Széchenyi István utca 2, Eger: the eagle on the corner, and a scroll nobody lettered

Eger, Hungary · corner of Széchenyi István utca and Bajcsy-Zsilinszky utca · no record found

At a glance

A pale green corner block at the head of Eger’s main street, three storeys over a row of shops, with the entrance set into the chamfered corner. Above that entrance a stone eagle stands with its wings out on a scroll that was carved to be lettered and never was. The house is worth a minute of anyone’s walk and we cannot tell you who built it, when, or what the scroll was meant to say. Seventeen houses on this street are in the national monument register. This one is not among them.

Key facts

• Address: Széchenyi István utca 2, 3300 Eger, on the corner of Bajcsy-Zsilinszky utca — both street signs are on the building
• Three upper storeys over a commercial ground floor; the corner is cut back into a narrow bay that carries the main doorway
• Over the doorway: an eagle with spread wings, standing on a blank cartouche with rolled ends
• Window surrounds banded with Greek key; palmette friezes and dentil courses over the openings; pediments — segmental over the corner bay, triangular elsewhere — on the first floor
• The ground floor is now an OTP Bank branch, which gives its own address as Széchenyi István utca 2
• It does not appear in the published list of Eger’s protected monuments, which records seventeen addresses on this street — including plain dwelling houses
• Coordinates: 47.90069, 20.37500

What you see

The building turns the corner by cutting it off: instead of a right angle there is a narrow vertical bay, one window wide, and the doorway is in it. That bay is the whole design. It rises through three floors, each window framed in a band of Greek key running down both jambs, and it is the only part of the elevation with the full apparatus — a carved panel of palmettes above the second-floor window, a dentil cornice above that, a pediment on top. The two long fronts repeat the same windows more quietly, with the meander reduced to a horizontal strip under each sill.

The eagle sits on the cornice over the door, between the ground floor and the first. It is carved in the round, life-size or a little over, wings half spread, head turned to its left, talons gripping the upper edge of a stone scroll whose ends curl away in flat volutes. The face of the scroll is smooth. On a bank, a company, a society or a guild house, that surface would carry a name. Here it carries a crack and a hundred years of weather.

What we do not know

Almost everything: the architect, the date, the client, and why the scroll is blank. The building is not an obscure one — it stands at the top of the busiest street in a county town, next door to the Lyceum and across from the Archbishop’s Palace — and it is simply not written down anywhere we could reach.

Borovszky’s county monograph, describing this stretch at the beginning of the twentieth century, lists along it the cathedral chapter’s foundation tenement «with its neat shops», the Heves County Savings Bank, the Eger Savings Bank, the Agrarian Savings Bank, the Eger printing company, the post and telegraph office and two clubs. It does not say which building is which, and an eagle on a blank shield would suit most of them.

If you know this house — a building licence, an old photograph, a postcard, a family memory of what the shopfronts used to be — we would be glad to hear it. Start your message with the title of this page so it reaches the right file: write to us, or send it on WhatsApp to +1 307 445 9906. Everything we are sent is checked against independent sources before it goes on the page, and we say where it came from.

Photographs

Practical information

• A working building on a pedestrian street: the front is the visit, and the eagle reads best from the opposite pavement, looking up.
• The Lyceum is next door, the Archbishop’s Palace fifty metres down the street, the basilica two minutes further on.

Sources

• Street signs, house number and shopfronts read from the photographs, 19 May 2026
• OTP Bank, branch directory — Eger, Széchenyi István utca 2
• Műemlékjegyzék, the Hungarian register of protected monuments, Eger: seventeen entries on Széchenyi utca (numbers 1–3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 24, 28, 29, 35, 40, 51, 55) and none at number 2
• Samu Borovszky (ed.), Magyarország vármegyéi és városai, Heves county volume — the description of Széchenyi utca and the institutions along it

Record researched and written by Luigi De Marchi for Cultural Heritage Online, 2026.

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