Oktogon

Oktogon appeared before the familiar urban intersection took shape around it. In the early eighteen seventies, there was still an undeveloped pit here between scattered houses. Members of the Metropolitan Board of Public Works—a commission that laid out new streets—planned to run an avenue through this place to City Park and have it crossed by the future Grand Boulevard. They immediately drew the meeting point of the two roads as an octagon.

Marking it out was not enough: without buildings, the square might have lost its shape in the next sale of the plots. So the architects Antal Szkalnitzky and Henrik Koch were commissioned to design four apartment buildings, all set the same way, with chamfered façades. Construction was assigned to a private company. It expected to recoup its investment through apartment rents, income from shops, and a generous tax break: for the first fifteen years, the owners paid no tax; for the next fifteen, they paid only part of it.

The company began construction in eighteen seventy-two. A year later, a financial crisis struck the banks and merchants who had invested in the new avenue. The enterprise lost its backing and soon withdrew from the contract, but the four buildings had been completed. Their chamfered façades fixed the square’s eight sides before the Grand Boulevard was extended across all of Pest. That is where the name came from: at first Hungarians called the place Nyolcszög, meaning Octagonal Square, and later the Latin-derived word “Oktogon” caught on.

The ground floors brought income from establishments that needed a steady flow of people. In eighteen eighty-eight, Abbázia Café opened on the southern chamfered corner. This is where the story of Vilmos Vázsonyi began—a young Jewish lawyer who earned his living through legal practice and wanted to give political representation to the small proprietors, merchants, and craftsmen of Terézváros. At the same time, he campaigned for Judaism to receive in Hungary the same official legal status as the recognized Christian denominations.

In eighteen ninety-four, Vázsonyi founded the Democratic Circle at the tables of Abbázia Café. The café proved more convenient than a closed salon: newspapers, voters, and city councilors came here every day. That same year, Vázsonyi was elected to the city council. Six years later, the circle grew into a party, and in nineteen oh one the residents of this district sent the lawyer to parliament. The campaign for recognition of Judaism ended in a corresponding law as early as eighteen ninety-five. Later, Vázsonyi became the first Hungarian minister of Jewish descent.

Abbázia Café closed for good in nineteen ninety-two. Its premises are now occupied by a bank. The chamfered corner of the apartment building itself remains—one of the four sides with which private investors managed to define Oktogon before going bankrupt.