Travel

Széchenyi lánchíd or Széchenyi Chain Bridge is a suspension bridge that spans the River Danube between Buda and Pest, the western and eastern sides of Budapest, the capital of Hungary. It was the first permanent bridge across the Danube in Budapest, and was opened in 1849.
The Two ends are:The Roosevelt Square with the Hungarian Academy and the Gresham Palace and the other one is Adam Clarck Square with the Zero kilometre Stone and the lower end of the Castle Hill Funicular,leading to Buda Castle.

The bridge was designed by the English engineer William Tierney Clark in 1839, after Count István Széchenyi’s initiative in the same year, with construction supervised locally by Scottish engineer Adam Clark .It is a larger scale version of William Tierney Clark’s earlier Marlow Bridge, across the River Thames in Marlow, England.

The bridge was opened in 1849, and thus became the first permanent bridge in the Hungarian capital. At the time, its center span of 202 m was one of the largest in the world. The pairs of lions at each of the abutments were added in 1852. The bridge was given its current name in 1898.

The bridge’s steel structure was totally updated and strengthened in 1914. In World War II, the bridge was damaged, and it needed to be rebuilt. The rebuilding was completed in in 1949.Among the anecdotes relating to the bridge, the most popular is that the lions were sculpted without tongues and the sculptor was mocked so much that he jumped into the Danube in shame. The lions do have tongues (although they are not visible from below, which is the usual point of view, as the lions are lying on a stone block some three meters high).