Cafés of Budapest

 

By Tímea Hajdú

Cafés and literature in the past

A well known Hungarian writer Sándor Márai famously wrote: There is no literature without cafes. Poets, writers, art critics and bohemian literature lovers used to inhabit Budapest’s famous coffee houses. During the 1800’s poets dreamed of revolutions around mahogany coffee tables and wrote their love poems on paper, which smelled of coffee and tobacco. In the beginning of the 20th century, cafes became the primary gathering places for writers and poets. Many of the most famous Hungarian novels and poems were written at the tables of the coffee houses. Artist gathered there to discuss their ideas, to woo critics, and to cry and laugh together. Unbeknownst to them, they created a small world, which atmosphere is still touchable in the cafes that survived the turbulent 20th century.
New York Café (Est. 1894)
New York Café is considered to be the most beautiful coffee house in Budapest. It’s inside a beautiful eclectic renaissance style palace on the Nagykörút. Today tourists, businessmen, and young aspiring artists inhabit the café. If we sit at one of the elegant round tables and close our eyes we can almost hear the quarrels, the reciting of poems and the sound of pens scratching the white paper. New York was lovingly nicknamed the “Old Lady” by the writers, who gathered there daily, before and between the two world wars. Nyugat the famous literary paper was edited on the gallery of the café. Endre Ady went there to write before going to the only pub on Andrássy the Három Holló (Three Crows) to drink himself under the table. Zsigmond Móricz, Sándor Bródy, Árpád Tóth and many others were frequent guests of New York. The urban legend says anyone could ask for paper and ink in the Café until Frigyes Karinthy splashed some ink on one of the white sofas. Ferenc Molnár wrote his legendary book The Paul Street Boys at one of the tables at New York Café. After the Second World War the art world scattered, the café was renamed Hungária. For a long time it was in danger of falling to ruin but in 2006 the New York Café was restored to its original glory.
Central (Est. 1887)

Central Cafe is in the very heart of the city center. There are several universities, libraries, and book publishing companies in its vicinity. It was renovated recently after years of being neglected. Today the marble tables, the black leather sofas, and the Thonet chairs are standing just like they did a century ago. From the walls photographs of famous poets and writers are looking down, all of them were once frequent guests of the café. Central became the favorite meeting point for intellectuals after the First World War, becoming almost as popular among writers as New York Café. Even the paper Nyugat moved its seat there in the 1920’s. Mihály Babits, Dezső Kosztolányi, Miklós Radnóti were all frequent guests. It was the meeting place for women writers too. Their club the Kaffka Margit Society gathered there every Wednesday from 1936. One of them was writer Sophie Török, who gave rendezvous to poet Mihály Babits at Central under the watching eyes of the art world. During the communist area the café became a canteen, then a youth club, it even functioned as a game room. Then in 2014, Central was completely restored with the intention of recreating the place the café once was where poets could pay with their poems and where history was made every day.

Hadik (Est. 1906)

Hadik is situated on the other side of the river Danube. It was the odd one out among the coffee houses, the only legendary café of Buda. In the 1920’s it was many writers favorite place. Frigyes Karinthy and Dezső Kosztolányi were the two most frequent guests there. Karinthy spent most of his time there; he was even the head of the café’s chess club. The café with its beautiful windows letting in the sunlight, and the comfortable armchairs in which the wives of the writers sat and talked, always had a friendly, almost small town feel to it. It had a short golden age between the two wars. It had a lively intellectual clientele which included Jenő Rejtő, Zsigmond Móricz, Milán Füst and many others. Hadik had a special table where all the poets and writers gathered with the lead of Karinthy. The café was the place to hide from critics, the place to meet with hopeful new writers, and also the place to meet the wives of the writers who choose Hadik over New York and Centrál to be their seat. Even though the three cafés were competitors they all had a special relationship with each other. Karinthy once wrote: ‘One day I decided to measure the speed of spreading a joke in Budapest. I wrote and then told a joke in Hadik. One and a half hour later I was in Centrál listening to my own joke.” Hadik closed during the Second World War and only opened its doors again seventy years later in 2010.

Budapest is a beautiful city, worth a visit!

More pictures of Budapest

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Photo credit: egykor.hu , moksa.hu, epiteszforum.hu, szeretlekmagyarorszag.hu

 

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