The boatman of the great flood

We're standing beside the Franciscan church, on the Kossuth Lajos utca side. Set into the wall, in a spot where you'd expect a window, there's a bronze relief. Come and stand in front of it for a moment.

You can see a man standing upright in a boat, surrounded by women and children he's pulling from the water. That's Baron Miklós Wesselényi, a Hungarian nobleman and reformer, and it's March 1838. Drifting ice on the Danube flooded Pest, more than half the houses collapsed, and Wesselényi rowed from roof to roof for days on end. "Row to wherever you're needed," he wrote in his diary. That same diary records how, along the way, he came across people who only rescued the rich, and only for payment.

Hungary has called him the boatman of the great flood ever since. The relief is by Barnabás Holló, who won gold at the Paris World's Fair in 1900, and it's hung here since April 1905. The whole story of that flood belongs to our walk along the Danube bank, so here we'll stay with the man in the boat.

We cross Ferenciek tere and look for the entrance to the Párizsi udvar on the other side.