40 YEARS, 40 STORIES | THE LONG HISTORY OF THE PEST-BUDA BUILDING

There are two inns in Buda Castle that date back hundreds of years and are still open today. One of them is the Fogadó a Vörös Sünhöz , which was Buda's first proper inn, but it was also a real community space where theatre performances were regularly held. This is where the Pest-Buda Restaurant & Hotel is located today... The history of the house dates back nearly 800 years. The building dates back to the 1260s-70s and may have been the first one-storey house in the city of Buda.In 1390, the building at 3 Fortuna Street was bought by Miklós Kanizsai, the master of the treasury, from Francesco Onofrio, son of Francesco of Florentine origin, for 1400 forints. Until the expulsion of the Turks in the late 1600s, the building changed hands many times, but what is amazing is that it survived the Turkish times and the reoccupation of Buda Castle, as a census of 1696 testifies. Archaeological research shows that in the Middle Ages the building was four separate houses built directly next to each other: the building on Hess András Square, its continuation on Fortuna Street, the buildings at 3 Fortuna Street and the buildings on Mihály Táncsics Street. In 1696, the year of the census, the property was donated to Andreas Siegl, the postmaster who opened the first inn in the town. The remains of the four houses were converted into three buildings, the one facing the square is already mentioned in the 1696 census as Vörös Sün. The three buildings were later merged and operated as the Inn to the Vörös Sün, which also hosted balls and plays. Archival material records that the building became the property of master builder Máté Nepauer in 1773, who continued to run it as an inn. Around 1810 a major rebuilding was carried out, which gave it its still dominant neoclassical architecture, but its Baroque past was also revived, for example the beautifully restored original Baroque roof beams. In 1906, Ferenc Baumann bought the building at 3 Fortuna Street, and he also designed the restaurant on the ground floor, which is still in use today.The property was nationalised in 1950, and in the 1960s one of Buda's best-known restaurants, the Pest-Buda Restaurant, was already operating on the ground floor. The building started to deteriorate rapidly from the 1980s onwards, until the Zsidai Group in the 2010s, with the utmost care and thoroughness, and with the patient and sacrificial work of architect Bernadett Hild and interior designer Tibor Somlai, completely restored it, and now this monumental building, which is not only a hotel and restaurant, but also an integral part of the history of Buda Castle and thus of Budapest, shines in a splendour perhaps never seen before.