The column in the middle of this square is a promise that was kept twice.
When the plague swept through in 1691, in a city that had barely recovered from the , the townspeople swore they would raise a monument if they survived. They did, and by 1706 one stood here. Three years later the plague came back. This time they promised a bigger and richer column, so the first was hauled off to a suburb and in June 1713 a baroque column of more than fourteen metres rose on this spot.
The reliefs at its base show the epidemic itself, with all the horrors the city went through. One of the saints on it is John the Baptist, and historians think he is there because in those same years of fear the last Muslims who had stayed on in Buda after the left had themselves baptised.
What you see is largely a reconstruction. The column was damaged in the war, taken down in 1956 and rebuilt from its own fragments, with copies standing in for the statues. The originals are in a museum elsewhere in the city.
A few steps away, the same confectionery has occupied the same building since 1827, with cherrywood display cases made around 1830 that have stood there ever since. The shop survived the siege, nationalisation under the communists and the return to private hands, which makes it one of the few places on this hill where something has carried on without a break.
This is where the walk ends. Next to the the stairs run down and come out on Hunyadi Janos ut, which drops in a few curves to the square by the where we started. Count on about a quarter of an hour, all downhill. If you would rather skip the stairs, we head back south across the plateau and take the funicular down, which lands on the same square. Bus 16 also leaves from there, crossing the Chain Bridge into Pest.
Sources. Story: Budavar, database of buildings and squares of the Castle District by the historical research institute, on the Trinity Column; Pestbuda, on the plague monuments of Buda and Pest Photos: Chad K, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
