Katona József Theatre closed its 40^th season on June 16, 2023. Director Gábor Máté said that “the entire staff at the Katona József Theatre can be proud that, despite the ongoing economic difficulties, the 40^th season was completed in a manner worthy of the institution’s roots.” During the anniversary celebrations, I watched the performances and was haunted by the thought of taking a look at the Katona (as the people of Budapest call it) from the outside of its cultural framework and creative idiom. For forty years, the Katona has provided a most intensely stimulating discourse on artistic creation in Hungarian, with a specific theatrical idiom and a continuous self-reflective redefinition of its own status. In search of such ideas as “roots” and “worthy manner”, in this paper I juxtapose the 1982 and 2022 seasons to evaluate this complexity as it can be understood and perceived from the perspective of European urban theatre cultures.