The Hungarian Parliament Building

“The Motherland does not have a house?. This was how it was bitterly written by Mihály Vörösmarty, one of the biggest poets of the bourgeois civilisation during the heroic period of Hungary in the year 1846. In fact, throughout the hundreds of years that the grandchildren of the warlord conqueror, ?rpád, governed the country, the family didn’t have its own or habitual home. However, there wasn’t a need for it, given that the prelates, the barons, the noblemen and the bourgeois “were from the country?. The places where they used to walk, play and converse were located in the Motherland. From the San Esteban period, the legendary founder of Hungary, the biggest turning point in the history of Hungary happened in the generation of Vörösmarty, between the era of the Reform and the Revolution of 1948 that followed. Propelled by the economic need, the social unrest and the blossoming of the culture, the hundreds of thousands of privileged in society and millions of the lower class, united into a historic community, the nation of Hungary. Furthermore, this nation, which was formed willingly by great men from that period – István Széchenyi, Miklós Wesselényi , Ferenc Deák , Lajos Kossuth, Ferenc Kölcsey, Sándor Petőfi – really needed a physical home. As counterweight to the King’s house being constructed in the heights of the Hill of Buda, the Pest bank of the river Danube was chosen in order to symbolise that the destiny of Hungary would lie in popular democracy and not in the whim of royalty.