Istvan Szechenyi

(21 September 1791, Vienna-8 April 1860, Döbling)

the initiator and most important figure of the national liberal reform movement, in Lajos Kossuth's words "the greatest Hungarian"

His father was Count Ferenc Széchényi, founder of the Hungarian National Museum and the National Széchényi Library, his mother was Julianna Festetics. He and his wife, Countess Crestentia Seilern, raised two children.

The young Széchenyi wandered around western Europe on several occasions between 1815 and 1825. What he saw in the developed civil states motivated him to change the backward state of his own country. In order to do this he tried to win over the big landowners.

Among other things, he brought horse racing to Hungary, donated a year's income from his lands to lay down the basis for the Hungarian Academy of Science, and established the National Casino. He also took part in the launch of steam boating on the Danube, established one of the first large industrial factories in Pest - the shipyard in Óbuda - along with a winter harbour. He encouraged the sanctioning of the law concerning the construction of the Danube-Tisza Canal, was involved with the issue of the national theatre, and directed the regulation of the Lower Danube, next to construction of the Lower Danube trackage road that was later named after him. The erection of the Chain Bridge, a permanent bridge connecting Pest and Buda where the nobility was first obliged to pay a bridge-toll, was also initiated by him.

István Széchényi received the victory of the 1848 War of Independence with joy, seeing it as the beginning of civil transformation. In the Batthyány Government he was Minister of Transport and of Public Labour. He had difficulty coping with the growing tension between the Viennese court and an independent Hungary. On 5th September 1848, accompanied by his private doctor, he moved to the neurological sanitarium of Döbling in Austria, near Vienna, where he spent the last years of his life.