0448 HUNGARY (Budapest) - The Fishermen's Bastion - part of Budapest, including the Banks of the Danube, the Buda Castle Quarter and Andrássy Avenue (UNESCO WHS)

0448 The Fishermen's Bastion in Budapest

Located in Budapest, on the Castle hill, behind the sanctuary of the Matthias Church, on the Buda bank of the Danube, the Fishermen's Bastion (Halászbástya) is a terrace which offers a splendid view of the Danube and Pest. It was named after the guild of fishermen, which lived nearby in Watertown (Vízívaros), at the foot of the hill, and was responsible for defending this stretch of the city walls in the Middle Ages. An old fish market also sat at this location during medieval times.

Designed by architect Frigyes Schulek and built between 1899 and 1905, the white-stoned Fisherman's Bastion is a combination of neo-Gothic and neo-Romanesque architecture and consists of turrets, projections, parapets, and climbing stairways. The bastion is made up of seven towers - each one symbolizing one of the seven Magyar tribes that, in 896, settled in the area now known as Hungary. A monumental double stairway, decorated with reliefs of coats-of-arms and various motifs, connects the bastion with the streets below. Between 1947-1948, the son of Frigyes Schulek, János Schulek, conducted the restoration project after its destruction during WWII.

The Fishermen's Bastion is part of Budapest, including the Banks of the Danube, the Buda Castle Quarter and Andrássy Avenue, an UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987, about which I wrote here.

About the stamp

The stamp is part of the series Health Tourism - Spas,about which I wrote here.

References
Fisherman's Bastion - Wikipedia

Sender: Petrică Sîrbu, Andreea Dolete and Marian Irimia
Sent from Budapest (Hungary), on 19.10.2012