Citadella Gift Shop
Liberty Gift Shop
Citadella Café
Chimney Cake
Liberty Café
EN 
When we gaze from the terraces of the Citadella across the urban fabric breathing in disciplined order along both banks of the Danube, we rarely consider that this captivating metropolis was not born by chance. The broad avenues, the elegant embankments framing the river, and the public buildings — harmonious even in their monumentality — were organised around a single, unshakeable vision in the last third of the 19th century. The driving force and chief shaper of this development of unparalleled scale was Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky – the era's legendary "chequered baron", whose name became fused with Budapest's golden age.
As deputy chairman of the Council of Public Works of the Capital, Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky directed for more than two decades the grandiose urban programme that, after the 1873 unification of Pest, Buda and Óbuda, raised the Hungarian capital to European rank. With legendary pedantry, puritan devotion and a knowledge of the most modern urban-planning principles of contemporary London and Paris, he set about clearing the dusty, tangled network of streets. To him and the body he led we owe the backbone of modern Budapest: the opening of the representative Andrássy Avenue toward the City Park, the construction of the Grand Boulevard that revolutionised inner-city transport, and the birth of the imposing stone embankments accompanying the regulation of the Danube, which at last connected the river to the city in a worthy manner.
Podmaniczky's merits extended far beyond merely laying out road networks, for he also attended fastidiously to the cultural and artistic standing of the built environment. With tireless diplomatic skill, he saw through the realisation of national symbols such as the Hungarian Royal Opera House designed by Miklós Ybl, the building of Margaret Bridge, and the preparation of the Parliament and Liberty Bridge (formerly Franz Joseph Bridge). He walked the city daily, personally supervised the construction sites, and insisted with relentless rigour on the highest level of architectural quality, from the tiniest details to the vast façades.
Standing atop Gellért Hill today, we still see this brilliantly conceived urban structure unfolding beneath our feet. Without Frigyes Podmaniczky, today's Budapest would lose its distinctive elegance, its airy scale and its metropolitan character; and the view from the Citadella is, at every moment, a reminder of the unshakeable bourgeois optimism and genius with which a handful of devoted planners drew the future of the Danube-side metropolis.
