Great Market Hall

The front on Fővám tér is raw brick, broken up by geometric bands in yellow and red, with shaped bricks pressed by hand for the window and door surrounds and carved stone cornices above them.

The roof is the part that stops people on the pavement: coloured glazed tiles from Vilmos Zsolnay’s factory in Pécs, laid in diamonds over the gable and the two towers, with Zsolnay pyrogranite on the facade below.

Look along the ridge for the roof ventilators, which end in decorated ceramic heads, and at the two clocks on the front. Both work again after the 1990s rebuild, and on the hour they play Kodály’s “Én elmentem a vásárba”, “I went to the fair”.

The whole front only fits in a photograph from across the road, by the tram stop. Two minutes out there before you go in.

The ground floor is the working market and much the biggest of the three, with 123 trading units. Of those, 49 sell fruit and vegetables and 29 are butchers and cured meat, the two largest trades in the building. Every greengrocer in the hall is down here, and so is every butcher but one.

That is why the people carrying shopping bags are on this floor and the people carrying cameras are upstairs. Look for the strings of dried paprika and garlic hung along the stall fronts, the ground paprika sold loose by weight, and the salami and cured meat counters that run alongside the produce.

Goods are sold by weight against a displayed price and haggling is not the custom here. The stalls just inside the main door are the ones aimed at visitors, so walk on a bit before you buy.

Every one of the hall’s nine restaurants and food counters is on the gallery, and so are 29 of its 30 gift shops. This is where the lángos is, along with goulash, stuffed cabbage and chimney cake, most of it sold over a counter and eaten standing at a shelf or squeezed onto a shared table.

There is a reason the gallery looks like this. When the hall opened in 1897 food could not be sold up here at all, so the balcony traders sold baskets, paper goods and gift items instead. The souvenirs are the original use. The food counters are the change.

The seating is badly oversubscribed between about 12:00 and 14:00, when people end up eating standing while others push past. Go up before noon or after two.

The cellar is the floor most visitors never find, and the one both the city’s monuments record and the people who actually shop here pick out. It holds 26 units: seven selling fish and game, five selling pickles, four selling household goods, and a supermarket, which keeps longer hours than the hall above it.

The pickles are the thing, jar after jar of them, and the fish counters are where Hungarians buy the carp and catfish for halászlé. It is quieter than the floors above and it smells strongly of vinegar and fish, which is either the whole point or your cue to go back up.

We could not confirm a public lift down to this level, so plan on the stairs.

The frame holding all this up is iron, not steel, cast by the Schlick foundry, with brick only in the outer walls. At its highest the hall is 28 metres from the floor to the ridge, and a smoke vent runs the full length of that ridge, built for the steam locomotive that used to shunt goods wagons into the building.

The clever part is underfoot. The competition demanded that the hall even out the differences in level between the streets around it, so Samu Pecz laid the ground floor to fall 1.585 metres along the building’s diagonal, leaving no step anywhere on the trading floor for a handcart to catch on.

The gallery and the cellar are level, so no two columns are the same height and no two staircases bridge the same drop. The plot is not square either, and there is not one right angle in the whole building. Stand at the foot of a staircase and sight along the balcony line. The size of the place hides all of it.