The Károlyi garden behind the wall

Through the gate you step into a walled garden that hides itself completely from the street. Find a bench with your back to the yellow palace and look down the length of the garden, because it still follows the straight lines that the Károlyi family's gardeners laid out.

This is the oldest garden in Budapest. During the flood you saw at the Franciscan church it stood entirely under water, and Count György Károlyi took in well over two hundred people in the palace next door.

In January 1849 Lajos Batthyány was sitting here at a family table. He was the first prime minister of Hungary, and his wife and the count's wife were sisters. That same evening the Austrians came into the house and took him away, and in October of that year he was shot. After that the palace was home first to Jelačić and then to Haynau, the generals who crushed the Hungarian revolution, and the order to arrest the count himself went out from his own house.

In the twentieth century the garden opened to everyone and the palace gained a museum, which today is devoted to Hungarian literature.

We leave the garden on the west side and take the Szerb utca, which brings us back toward the river.