Great Market Hall History

Budapest’s population quadrupled after the Compromise of 1867 and passed half a million before the century was out. Its food came through 44 markets with four to eight thousand traders. Most had no water, animals and food were sold side by side, and hygiene was nowhere near what the medical officers required.

The press attacked the street markets as chaotic, dirty and a disease risk, and pressed for the regulated market-hall system that was spreading through western Europe. Berlin, Leipzig and Frankfurt were the models the city had in mind.

In 1892 the Economic and Food Supply Committee put the first hall out to competition, and the city decided to build five at once rather than one.

Nine designs came in. The jury could not separate three of them and placed them joint first: Samu Pecz’s, one from the Paris architects Escande and Gourmez, and one from a Leipzig team. Pecz’s was the most practical, and after a second competition against the French entry he was commissioned for the working drawings.

Building started on 25 June 1894 and went badly at least once. Hungarian stonemasons struck for months in protest at the contractor employing large numbers of Czech and Italian workers.

Then, on 30 June 1896, ten days before the building was due to be handed over, fire ran through it. Sixty metres of the main nave’s roof burned, the iron glowed through and some supports were left twisted.

A year of inquiry never established the cause. The suspicion was a coke basket used to repair the roof covering, which set light to the boarding under the tin. Pecz redrew the roof with more hydrants, hatches and ladders, and the hall was finished in October.

The Fővám tér site was picked so that goods could arrive three ways. A track ran the full length of the western side and into the building, and 22 wagons could be pushed inside in three or four shunts, with three hours allowed to unload them. The railway carried anything addressed to the hall at a ten per cent discount.

For cargo off the Danube, a tunnel more than 120 metres long ran from the cellar to the embankment, where two landing bridges and a pontoon wharf took the boats. The smoke vent along the whole ridge of the roof exists because a steam locomotive came inside.

The hall cost 1.9 million to build, almost as much as the district’s other four halls put together, and the fire damage and the rail works are why.

Nándor Ziegler, the first director, ran a tight building. Traders could use only the hall’s own fittings and could not put up booths of their own. A second stall could be rented only next to the first, and only if nobody else wanted it. Signs and advertisements needed management’s permission, and rents were set by product, with the fishmongers paying most because of their chilled counters.

In exchange, traders used the hall’s lifts and its telephone free of charge. Goods came in at night, and the market traded from five to noon and four to seven.

Hawking, shouting, singing, whistling and swearing were all banned, and a notice forbidding traders to shout at customers hung where nobody could miss it. Poultry could not be let loose in the building, and the manager’s written permission was needed before exhausted birds could be let out into the yard.

The hall was not a success on opening. The stricter quality rules shut produce out. Shoppers mourned the atmosphere of the old markets, and the Vasárnapi Újság worried that the hall would make the principle of uniformity win.

Customers complained that everything cost more than before, and that the sellers were rude and short-changed them, which was at least partly because they were not used to selling loose goods by weight. Somebody suggested running courses for the traders. Goods were confiscated often enough that the market women set up a trade body of their own, the Market Hall Traders’ Association.

Then trade rose month by month, and everyone came round.

The Second World War did the worst damage. The poultry hall at the back was destroyed outright and the rearmost transept badly hurt. The repairs put speed before care, and ceramics that had been stored in the cellar were pressed back into service.

Changing trade and new hygiene rules brought enclosed pavilions, and in the 1960s the hall lost its character to a bódéváros, a town of booths, that grew inside the great space, with goods lifts and their machine rooms built up into it. A 1968 facade repair partly arcaded the main front.

By 1991 the building was structurally dangerous and was cleared. The reconstruction of 1992 to 1994, by György Tokár, Györgyi Hidasi and Gergely Nagy, restored the facade and the interior, reorganised the trade by commodity with separate goods routes in the cellar, and hid every pipe and duct so that nothing shows in the hall.

The hardest part was replacing the hand-pressed shaped bricks and the Zsolnay ceramics. About forty metres of the Danube tunnel had collapsed, but its base slab on one-metre larch piles was sound, so it was repaired, and a watertight gate now keeps floodwater out of the cellar.