Route Image 1 - Description
Route Image 2 - Description

Fischer Rézi on Kristóf tér

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This is one of the smallest squares in the old town, and in the middle of it stands a stone fountain with a girl on top. We walk around it and look for the wheel at the back, the one that used to pump the water up.

 

The guild of Pest fishermen had her made in 1862 by László Dunaiszky, for Hal tér, the fish market that lay a little further south along the embankment. The water from this tap was considered the cleanest in Pest, and the city nicknamed the girl Fischer Rézi. When the Erzsébet bridge was built, Hal tér vanished from the map and the fountain moved to the People's Park in 1899. There it was torn down in the 1960s to make way for a road and struck from the list of monuments. György Rajna tracked down the broken pieces in a warehouse, Sándor Lovas put them back together, and since 1985 Rézi has stood here, a few hundred metres from where she started.

 

The square owes its name to something that now survives only in that name. On the corner with Váci utca, a pharmacy from 1791 had a giant Saint Christopher of more than three metres, carved from a single block of stone and transported upright because the sculptor was afraid it would break lying down. The people of Pest named tall men after him. In 1909 the house was levelled and the statue was sawn into three.

 

This is where the walk ends. We head into Váci utca, and after a minute or two we are back on Vörösmarty tér, where you started this morning or this afternoon.

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