Lukacs Baths

This guide to Lukacs Baths in Budapest starts with a courtyard wall covered in marble plaques, each one carved by a bather who came here in pain and left thanking the water. It traces the springs back to the Knights of Saint John in the twelfth century, through their use powering an Ottoman gunpowder mill, to the 1880s entrepreneur Fulop Palotay who rebuilt the site as a proper spa. Along the way you will hear how the plaques survived a war that shattered most of them, and why composers and writers later treated Lukacs less like a hospital and more like a second living room.