For more than seventy years this yellow building was the official residence of Hungary's head of government, and today it's where the president lives.
Its most famous resident was , a geographer by profession, who sat down in this house on the night of 2 to 3 April 1941 to write a letter and then shot himself. A few months earlier he had signed a treaty of friendship with Yugoslavia, and when Germany demanded that Hungarian troops take part in the attack on that very country, and the army leadership agreed, he could see no way out.
In the letter he wrote that they had sided with scoundrels, that they were becoming grave robbers, and as a final line, in four words: I failed to stop you, I am guilty. The next day the troops moved in. To this day there are Hungarians who don't believe he did it himself.
The building beside it has a lighter story. It was once a monastery church, until Emperor dissolved the order and had it turned into a theatre, and in 1790 a play was performed here in Hungarian for the first time in history, in a city where government and trade were conducted in German and Latin. Ten years later, Beethoven played here.
We walk out onto the open square that begins just behind it.
Sources. Story: Farewell letter of Pál Teleki, 3 April 1941, Second World War digital collection of the University Library of Szeged Photos: Pál Teleki, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
