LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! We are in a house which has seen an innumerable amount of pain and suffering. A long time ago, thieves, murderers, witches and those who simply swore or opened their mouths were captured and imprisoned here in the town dungeon. They might have said but ‚By Jove!', it carried exactly 6 months of imprisonment. The most infamous prisoner of the place was the petticoat white woman from Levoca (now Slovakia). Her case began in 1713 and sentence was delivered 2 years later. She was waiting for her fate to be accomplished in the dungeon under military custody. Some of the delegated judges doubted whether tormenting a noblewoman was rightful or not. The dispute made the trial rather lengthy. At last the Chancellor and His Majesty, the Emperor issued orders the beauty to be tormented. His Majesty argued like this: ‚Although there exists no legal paragraph allowing it, no law prohibits us from doing so'. The only relief the judges made was not to put the ‚red-hot iron trial' into operation. But she could not escape ‚pulleying'. It consisted of hanging weighty stones on her legs and then lifting her with a rope fitted under her arms. This privilege was offered exclusively to those prisoners whose death sentence had already been settled. However painful her torturing was, Júlia Géczy Mrs Korponay confessed no more than she had before. Sentence was announced at 11 on 25 September 1715, and she was beheaded in the market of the Győr Castle (today's Széchenyi Square) within the sight of public crowds. She walked across this chamber on her last way, and left through a former door over there, which was walled up a century ago. She watched the scaffold being erected and then she had to listen to her death sentence again. The capital crime she had committed was her personal contact with the followers of Rákóczi. She was thick with them and was also engaged in smuggling letters. Somehow she always chose the wrong time to betray her home country. At one time she sold Kuruts (Rákóczi's soldiers in the insurrectionist army) to Labants (Hapsburg soldiers), and then the Castle of Levoca was lost because of her treason, too. She would have liked to receive land property as a reward. Later, being disappointed in her hopes, the extremely pretty and highly-educated Júlia set herself against the Labants. But she came badly off it. She wrote to her husband: ‚I have lost everything, the Emperor has not signed the endowment, and as for me, I am imprisoned. What is more, I might easily die on the scaffold, but I will never betray my father.' Júlia lived in an age, when human life was not worth much. This building here functioned as Town Hall for 300 years. Its walls have seen István Széchenyi, the Greatest Hungarian, and Ferenc Deák, the Sage of the Country. From the balcony of the building Lajos Kossuth incited the rebels to fight during the Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence of 1848-49. Today it is
the home of the TOWN ARCHIVES, the editorial office of
‚MŰHELY' cultural periodical.
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