The building, whose name translates literally as “house standing on legs”, was erected in 1774 in Baroque style. József Bittner, master musician of the town tower resided in the adjacent house with his fellow musicians. Bittner was commissioned by the town in 1772 to act as “tower master”; he was granted citizenship in 1775. The tower musicians’ task was to play music in the morning and in the evening, and their fees were paid from the interest rates generated by a local foundation. They also played their trumpets at the local Catholic church during the services and also performed at weddings and balls.
On 9 June 1774, Bittner approached the town management and requested that over the butcher’s shop a new dance and ball room be built. With the rising number of residents, the private dwelling house had proved too small by the end of the 1700s, and they needed a larger community space. The demand for new events was growing, and weddings, engagement parties were organised outside the carnival season in February. Since two functions needed to be performed on a single site, experts decided to apply a unique architectural solution.
The building was partly built leaning onto the town wall and partly on a row of colonnade that were topped with vaults so as to bear heavier load – hence the name of the house. This was not a singular solution; there is an almost identical construction on Sopron’s Orsolya Square, and it is possible that the idea to build such a house had been taken from there considering that the building in Sopron also had a butcher’s shop on the ground floor. There were very similar buildings in other towns in the Western part of Hungary and also in Upper Hungary (today’s eastern Slovakia). In this house, above the butcher’s shop, there were residential units. One famous resident of the 19th century was a military officer from Brno, a certain József Szlávik, who moved to Kőszeg following his retirement as many other former military officers in the period did. It was Szlávik’s son who sold the house to Albert Pákl in 1922 which the latter owned until 1952.
The house was first renovated in 1959 and then in 1970-71, and this was when the town’s archives were moved to this building boasting a large number of documents from mediaeval times.
