Jókai-Feszty Mansion, 39 Bajza street

  
Source: MESZL Budapest Collection, Petőfi Literary Museum Art Collection

After 1880, artists were able to get building properties on the left side of Andrássy Road, at around the current Bajza street. Many painters and sculptors found their homes in studio houses and mansions and in Epreskert. One of these houses had a large role of cultural and social development for ten years, thanks to its three charismatic residents.

  
The three owners of the mansion (left to right): Mór Jókai, writer, Róza Jókai, painter and writer, step-daughter of Mór Jókai and Árpád Feszty, painter, husband of Róza Jókai
Source: fortepan.hu, Wikipedia

Mór Jókai, Hungarian writer, arrived to the Bajza street mansion with his daughter. The family relations are really convoluted, and the fact that in the Jókai household every girl was called Róza, makes it harder to untangle. To put it simply: Jókai’s first wife was Róza Laborfalvy, she lived from 1817 to 1886. Everyone was completely outraged about Jókai’s choice (just like with his second wife later), considering the lady was an actress, and 8 years older than the young revolutionist, and to top it all off, she had a child outside of marriage from the actor, Márton Lendvay. The child was the 12-year-old Róza Benke. Growing up, the girl gave birth to another illegitimate child, whose name was also Róza. Róza Benke died young the same year the youngest Róza was born, so Mór Jókai adopted her and gave his name to the little girl - that’s how his first wife’s grandchild became his step-daughter. The real identity of the girl’s father was surrounded by the thick fog of mystery, of course, much to the little girl’s sorrow. If the town gossip was to be believed, the father never acknowledging his daughter was none other than Count Gyula Andrássy, sr.

  
The Jókai-family through the years (left to right): Mór Jókai and his first wife, Róza Laborfalvy (1873), the Jókai- and Feszty-family on the day of Róza Jókai and Árpád Feszty's wedding (1888), and Mór Jókai and his second wife, Nagy Bella (1899)
Source: National Széchényi Library, the archives of Masa Feszty and Antal Ijjas, Wikipedia

In 1890, after the death of Mór Jókai’s wife, he bought the house on 39 Bajza street with his stepdaughter, Róza Jókai, and her husband, the famous painter, Árpád Feszty. Feszty had the curved-windowed house built modeled after the Venetian mansions, while the writer made the garden more homely with trees and flowers. Feszty had travelled a lot in Venice before the house. He had sketched many of the mansions, ornaments, motifs and - in a very risky way from today’s perspective - he had taken some of the moveable or broken ornaments from dilapidated buildings, which were used in the construction of his mansion. This is how two stone lions, some window ornaments, door frames, handles and some of the pieces in the studio got into the building.

 
Source: lasbudapestet.blog.hu, Wikipedia

Jókai lived upstairs, while the ground floor with its five rooms was for the young couple. Originally, the upstairs suite consisted of two rooms: a 50 m2 study and another bigger room. In 1894, a small bathroom and a smaller room was added to it. The 100 m2 studio of Árpád Feszty had a cross-beamed, carved wooden ceiling, its canopy shapes show similarities with the ceilings of the Parliament’s representative rooms. The mansion has two sections: the studio facing Kmety street and the living quarters facing Bajza street. The back corner of the studio was cut off to make a skylight combined with a roof window on the north side. At the entrance the stairs from the garden had expanded into a large terrace, where they could sit under the vines running up the trellises during the summer.

 
Mór Jókai in his study (left) and the studio of Árpád Feszty (right)
Source: Wikipedia, mrfoster.blog.hu

The artist family had a busy social life, which focused around the impressive rooms of the mansion: the upstairs study, the studio and the mahogany parlour room of Mrs. Feszty. Here the first real artists’ parlour was made. However, dark days fell on the mansion, when the writer married the 20-year-old protégé, Bella Nagy, and moved out. Árpád Feszty went bankrupt and had to sell the house. His daughter, Masa said that the idea of the Petőfi Society came from Sándor Bródy, and with Ferenc Herczeg presiding over them, they bought the house in 1907, so with the art nouveau renovations of the 20^th century, it turned into the Petőfi-Jókai memorial house, the predecessor of the Petőfi Literary Museum. In 1908, as per the plans of the Vágó brothers, the building was reconstructed as a community building in art nouveau style, using the studio and the mansion, too. The facade was covered in Zsolnay ceramics up to the shoulders and completely lost the Venetian palace look.

  
Source: lasdbudapestet.blog.hu, mke.hu

In World War II the building was injured, then later Gyula Káesz, the sworn enemy of the art nouveau, robbed the building of all its ornaments and demolished the added section of the Vágó brothers. After the Petőfi Literary Museum moved to the Károlyi Mansion, the Anthropology department of the Natural History Museum had used it as storage, the studio holding the bones. In the 1990s Pál Kő sculptor has worked here.

  
Source: Wikipedia

Today, the mansion is preserving the Italian renaissance feel, but the bland, boring giant stuck to its side resembles more of an abandoned industrial building than the artists’ mansion that held wonderful feasts back in the day. On the wall of the house there is a barely legible memorial plaque for Jókai (work of István Szentgyörgyi sculptor), for what seems like a hundred years, the doors are closed, its walls filled with history staring out onto Bajza street silently.

Source: Wikipedia

Sources: lasdbudapestet.blogspot.com, mrfoster.blog.hu, egy.hu, kozterkep.hu