Istenszeme Guesthouse, Historic guesthouse in Zugliget, Budapest, Hungary.
The Istenszeme Guesthouse, also called Villa Haggenmacher, stands in Zugliget in Budapest's 12th district. Its core is an 18th-century inn rebuilt in 1884–1885 for Károly Haggenmacher, with stained-glass windows brought from Switzerland and tiled stoves. The tympanum keeps the eye symbol that gave the house its name, and the building is now empty.
A guesthouse already operated on this site in the 1760s, on the estate of court councillor Johann Karl von Stettner. In 1837 Lajos Kossuth stayed here for a few weeks with his family and was arrested in the house over the banned Törvényhatósági Tudósítások. The building burned down in 1846 and was soon rebuilt. Károly Haggenmacher bought the Zugliget estate in 1880 and had a new villa built on the guesthouse site in 1884–1885.
The name Istenszeme (Eye of God) has three explanations in local tradition: a large eye in the tympanum of the classical building, the terrace and meadow above it still called Istenszeme-rét, or the small lake in the garden. The eye was kept on the facade after the 1884–85 rebuilding. A memorial plaque to Kossuth's arrest, made by Tamás Varga, was replaced in 1999 on the east wall.
The villa stands at Szilassy út 3 in Zugliget, in Budapest's 12th district, on the site of the former Stettner estate. The building is empty and deteriorating, with no maintenance carried out as of autumn 2024, so it can only be viewed from outside. The pond that once supplied the name has had no water since the early 1990s, when the Istenszeme and Disznófő springs were diverted into the sewer.
The building's tympanum carried a large eye symbol, restored after an 1846 fire and kept when Károly Haggenmacher rebuilt the house in 1884–1885. Chestnut trees he planted by the pond are said to be the only ones of their kind in the Buda hills.
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