Teatrul Szigligeti Oradea

The Theater in Oradea is a building with a decisive presence in the city's appearance, built in one of the main squares of the city, on the north side of Bémer Square, the current Ferdinand Square.

After several non-fruitful competitions, the city has accredited the design of the new theater of the Viennese firm "Fellner und Helmer", which already has a European reputation. In its decades of activity, the company could already be proud of references from Zurich to Odessa, raising nearly fifty theaters according to the most modern requirements of the era. The façade of the building is undoubtedly a Greek one: the six ionic columns together with the tympanum supported by them speak for themselves and the allegorical figures of the latter support the classical character of the façade.

The typed bas-reliefs were created by a local sculptor, Peller Ferenc. 25 years after its use, the sculptures began to erode and whole pieces of the composition began to fall. The city's leadership decided to remove the composition so that the timer of the building was left unpopulated until another local sculptor, Deák Árpád, decided to repopulate it.

In front of the theater there is the bust of Szigligeti Ede, the one called the theater. It does not have the same dating as the building, but when the theater was appointed it was decided that a large bust funded by public donations would be raised to the great Oradean artist and that the circular area in front of the theater would be created for this purpose. The inauguration of the statue took place on 15 December 1912.

The first show on this stage (on "planks representing a whole world") began with overture at 7 o'clock on October 15, 1900.

The new director, Somogyi Károly, began working with a band of over 80 people, of whom nearly 60 were actors. This number seems great nowadays, but we have to keep in mind that, first of all, the band played both prose and musical pieces (usually operetta but also works) and secondly there were many premieres: two weeks each week, but they were weeks even with three premieres. In the first season - 1900-1901 - Somogyi had 136 awards. The reason: the city was small and a play was only two or three times, but there were also great shows that ran nine or ten times.

In the next two decades this was the general situation of the Oradea theater, the change being due only to the general poverty condition after the end of the First World War. Even in that difficult time, Oradea hosted the largest Hungarian actors and some of them even started from this city to a national fame.