Széchenyi Chain Bridge, Budapest · Travel Poster

Each poster comes with a letter home. Ella writes about the place and its hidden history, and the details that never makes it into the guidebooks.

Everyone crosses the Chain Bridge for the view, the two grand stone lions at either end, Buda Castle glowing on one bank and the Parliament on the other, and almost nobody knows the quiet little scandal the lions have been carrying since 1852. The story goes that when the sculptor János Marschalkó unveiled them at the opening, a boy in the crowd shouted that the lions had no tongues, and that the humiliated artist was so shamed he threw himself off the bridge into the Danube. It is a wonderful story, and it is completely untrue. The lions do have tongues. Marschalkó carved them, but he set them deep at the back of those wide open jaws, and because the beasts sit so high on their plinths you simply cannot see that far into the mouth from the pavement below. Marschalkó did not drown himself over it either. He lived on for decades, and by one account he was so tired of the rumour that he went off to a travelling menagerie with friends to look at a real lion and prove his carving was right. The tale itself turns out to be a hand me down, borrowed from an older Austrian joke about a statue with a missing stirrup. The guidebooks send you to photograph the bridge from the river. They rarely tell you to walk right up to a lion, tip your head back, and look for the tongue that has been hiding in plain sight the whole time

This poster is an original illustration in watercolour and ink, painted exclusively for the Ella's Adventures travel poster series.

No frame included.