Vörös Sün, Budapest — A Lost Old Pub

What happened

The Red Hedgehog stands at the corner of Hess András tér and Fortuna utca in the Buda castle quarter, and Hungarian accounts call it the oldest building in Budapest still in use: several early gothic houses of about 1260, joined into one in the eighteenth century. The inn it is named after was for a long time the only one in the castle district. In 1764 a dance hall went up in its garden, and a stage inside the hall soon after, at the suggestion of the Austrian theatre director Felix Berner; the first theatre performances in Buda were given there, and a company of children aged six to fourteen played in the great hall and toured the country. The master builder Máté Nöpauer bought the property in 1773 and asked leave to hold public balls in the dance hall, which the Buda council refused in 1776 on the grounds that the town needed no more assembly rooms. When the ruler moved the government offices from Pozsony to Buda in 1783, the magistrate told Nöpauer that seven rooms and no modern comforts would not answer; he did not extend the house, and Heinrich Bulla took a lease of the inn's trade instead. A dentist from Pest advertised his new rooms at number 8 of the inn in 1789, and by 1798 he and his brother were both practising there. The house worked as the castle's first inn until 1805. The relief of a red hedgehog, the sign of the Zum Roten Igl, was set on the front in 1820 and is still there.

What is there now

Flats in a protected building. OpenStreetMap holds the house at Hess András tér 3 as apartments and marks it as an attraction; the Hungarian monument register lists it under number 15038 as a three-fronted baroque dwelling house of the end of the seventeenth century, with medieval detail and a classicist façade, named after the former Vörös Sün guest inn. The hedgehog relief of 1820 is on the wall for anyone walking up from the Matthias church.

Location recorded from Hungarian monument register, törzsszám 15038, read at muemlekem.hu, which gives N 47° 30,193' E 19° 1,961'; OpenStreetMap way/379070848 holds the same house at Hess András tér 3, 2026-09-12 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/379070848).

Sources

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