Sights in Budapest
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House of Terror
This startling museum is housed in what was once the headquarters of the dreaded ÁVH secret police. The building has a ghastly history, for it was here that many activists of every political persuasion that was out of fashion before and after WWII were taken for interrogation and torture. The walls were apparently double thickness to mute the screams. A plaque on the outside of this house of shame reads in part: ‘We cannot forget the horror of terror, and the victims will always be remembered’.
The museum focuses on the crimes and atrocities committed by both Hungary’s fascist and Stalinist regimes in a permanent exhibition called Double Occupation. But the years aft…
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Basilica of St Stephen
Budapest’s neoclassical cathedral was built over the course of half a century and completed in 1905. Much of the interruption had to do with the fiasco in 1868 when the dome collapsed during a storm, and the structure had to be demolished and rebuilt from the ground up. The basilica is rather dark and gloomy inside, but take a trip to the top of the dome, which can be reached by lift and 146 steps and offers one of the best views in the city.
To the right as you enter the basilica is a small treasury of ecclesiastical objects. Behind the main altar and to the left is the basilica’s major draw card: the Holy Right Chapel. It contains the Holy Right (also known as the Hol…
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Nyugati Train Station
The large iron and glass structure on Nyugati tér (known as Marx tér until the early 1990s) is the Nyugati train station, built in 1877 by the Paris-based Eiffel Company. In the early 1970s a train actually crashed through the enormous glass screen on the main facade when its brakes failed, coming to rest at the 4 and 6 tram line. The old dining hall on the south side now houses one of the world’s most elegant McDonald’s.
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Hospital in the Rock
Part of the Castle Hill caves network, this newly opened attraction was used extensively during the siege of Budapest during WWII. It contains original medical equipment as well as some 70 wax figures and is visited on a guided half-hour tour. More interesting is the hour-long ‘full tour‘ (3000/1500/7000Ft), which includes a walk through a Cold War–era nuclear bunker.
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Castle Hill
Castle Hill, a 1km-long limestone plateau towering 170m above the Danube, contains Budapest's most important medieval monuments and museums and is a Unesco World Heritage Site. It is the premier sight in the capital, and with its grand views and so many things to see, you should start here.
Below is a 28km network of caves formed by thermal springs that were supposedly used by the Turks for military purposes, as air-raid shelters during WWII, and as a secret military installation during the Cold War.
The walled area consists of two distinct parts: the Old Town to the north, where commoners lived in the Middle Ages (the current owners of the coveted burgher houses here are …
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Hungarian National Museum
The National Museum (a neoclassical structure, purpose-built in 1847) houses Hungary’s most important collection of historical relics. Exhibits trace the history of the Carpathian Basin from earliest times to the end of the Avar period in the early 9th century (on the 1st floor); and the Magyar people and the nation from the conquest of the Carpathian basin to the fall of communism (on the 2nd floor). In the basement, a lapidarium has finds from Roman, medieval and early modern times. Look out for the enormous 3rd-century Roman mosaic from Balácapuszta, near Veszprém; the crimson silk royal coronation robe (or mantle) stitched by nuns in 1031; a reconstructed 3rd-century …
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Great Synagogue
The Great Synagogue is the largest Jewish house of worship in the world outside New York City and can seat 3000. Built in 1859 according to the designs of Frigyes Feszl, the synagogue contains both Romantic-style and Moorish architectural elements. It was renovated largely with private donations, including a cool US$5 million from fragrance and cosmetics baroness Estée Lauder, in the 1990s.On the synagogue’s north side, the Holocaust Memorial (opposite VII Wesselényi utca 6) stands over the mass graves of those murdered by the Nazis in 1944–45. On the leaves of the metal ‘tree of life’ are the family names of some of the hundreds of thousands of victims.
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Ethnography Museum
Visitors are offered an easy introduction to traditional Hungarian life at this sprawling museum opposite the parliament building with thousands of displays in 13 rooms on the 1st floor. The mock-ups of peasant houses from the Őrség and Sárköz regions of Western and Southern Transdanubia are well done, and there are also some priceless objects collected from Transdanubia. On the 2nd floor, most of the temporary exhibitions deal with other peoples of Europe and farther afield: Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas. The building itself was designed in 1893 to house the Supreme Court; note the ceiling fresco in the lobby of Justice by Károly Lotz.
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Zwack Unicum Museum & Visitor Centre
If you really can’t get enough of Unicum – the thick, brown medicinal-tasting bitter aperitif made from 40 herbs, clocking in at 42% alcohol, supposedly named by Franz Joseph himself – visit this very commercial museum tracing the history of the product since it was first made in 1790 and inviting visitors to buy big at its sample store (mintabolt). Enter from Dandár utca.
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Bedő House
Just around the corner from Kossuth Lajos tér is this stunning art nouveau apartment block deigned by Emil Vidor and built in 1903. Now a shrine to Hungarian Secessionist interiors, its three floors are crammed with furniture, porcelain, ironwork, paintings and objets d’art. The lovely Art Nouveau Café is on the ground floor.
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Gellért Baths
The city's most famous thermal spa is the Gellért Baths below Gellért Hill. Soaking in this Art Nouveau palace has been likened to taking a bath in a cathedral. The pools here maintain a constant temperature of 44°C (111°F).
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Buda Hills
With 'peaks' reaching over 500m, a comprehensive system of trails and no lack of unusual conveyances, the Buda Hills make up what is the city's playground, and they're a welcome respite from hot, dusty Pest in the warmer months. Indeed, some well-heeled Budapest families have summer homes here. If you're planning to ramble, take along a copy of Cartographia's 1: 30,000 A Budai-hegység map (No 6), available from bookshops and newsstands throughout the city.
Apart from the Béla Bartók Memorial House, there are very few sights per se, though you might want to poke your head into one of the Buda Hills' several caves.
With all the unusual transport options, heading for the h…
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Raoul Wallenberg Memorial
A statue called the Serpent Slayer in honour of Raoul Wallenberg by Pál Pátzay stands in XIII Szent István Park. Of all the 'righteous gentiles' honoured by Jews around the world, the most revered is Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat and businessman who rescued as many as 35,000 Hungarian Jews during WWII.
Wallenberg, who came from a long line of bankers and diplomats, began working in 1936 for a trading firm whose president was a Hungarian Jew. In July 1944 the Swedish Foreign Ministry, at the request of Jewish and refugee organisations in the USA, sent the 32-year-old Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest as an attaché to the embassy there. By that time, al…
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Gellért Hill & The Tabán
Gellért Hill, a rocky hill southeast of the Castle District, is crowned with a fortress and the Independence Monument. From Gellért Hill, you can't beat the views of the Royal Palace or the Danube and its fine bridges, and Jubilee Park on the south side is an ideal spot for a picnic. The Tabán, the leafy area between Gellért and Castle Hills, stretching northwest as far as Déli train station, is associated with the Serbs, who settled here after fleeing from the Turks in the early 18th century.
Plaques on I Döbrentei utca mark the water level of the Danube during two devastating floods in 1775 and 1838.
This neighbourhood later became known for its restaurants and wi…
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Fő Utca
Fő utca is the arrow-straight ‘Main St’ running from Clark Ádám tér through Víziváros; it dates from Roman times. At the former Capuchin church, used as a mosque during the Turkish occupation, you can see the remains of an Islamic-style ogee-arched door and window on the southern side. Around the corner there’s the seal of King Matthias Corvinus – a raven with a ring in its beak – and a little square with the delightful Lajos Fountain (Lajos kútja; 1904) called Corvin tér. The Eclectic building on the north side at No 8 is the Buda Concert Hall. To the north the Iron Stump is the odd-looking tree trunk into which itinerant artisans and merchants would drive a nail to mark…
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Memento Park
Home to almost four dozen statues, busts and plaques of Lenin, Marx, Béla Kun and ‘heroic’ workers such as have ended up on trash heaps in other former socialist countries, the recently renamed Memento Park, 10km southwest of the city centre, is a mind-blowing place to visit. Ogle the socialist realism and try to imagine that at least four of these monstrous relics were erected as recently as the late 1980s; a few, including the Béla Kun memorial of our ‘hero’ in a crowd by fence-sitting sculptor Imre Varga were still in place when this author moved to Budapest in early 1992. New attractions here are the replicated remains of Stalin’s boots, all that was left after a crow…
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Crown Of St Stephen
Legend tells us that it was Asztrik, the first abbot of the Benedictine monastery at Pannonhalma in Western Transdanubia, who presented a crown to Stephen as a gift from Pope Sylvester II around the year 1000, thus legitimising the new king's rule and assuring his loyalty to Rome over Constantinople. It's a nice story but has nothing to do with the object on display in the Parliament building.
That two-part crown, with its characteristic bent cross, pendants hanging on either side and enamelled plaques of the Apostles, dates from the 12th century. Regardless of its provenance, the Crown of St Stephen has become the very symbol of the Hungarian nation.
The crown has disappe…
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Parliament
The parliament building, designed by Imre Steindl and completed in 1902, has 690 sumptuously decorated rooms but you’ll only get to see three on a guided tour of the North Wing: the main staircase and landing, where the Crown of St Stephen, the nation’s most important national icon, is on display, along with the ceremonial sword, orb and the oldest object among the coronation regalia, the 10th-century Persian-made sceptre with a crystal head depicting a lion; the Loge Hall; and the Congress Hall, where the House of Lords of the one-time bicameral assembly sat until 1944. The building is a blend of many architectural styles (neo-Gothic, neo-Romanesque, neobaroque) and over…
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Royal Palace
The enormous palace complex has been razed and rebuilt at least a half-dozen times over the past seven centuries. Béla IV established a royal residence here in the mid-13th century and subsequent kings added on to it. The palace was levelled in the battle to rout the Turks in 1686; the Habsburgs rebuilt it, but spent very little time here. Today the Royal Palace contains two important museums as well as the National Széchenyi Library, which contains codices and manuscripts, a large collection of foreign newspapers and a copy of everything published in Hungary or the Hungarian language. It was founded by Count Ferenc Széchenyi (1754–1820), father of István Széchenyi, wh…
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Liberty Monument
The lovely lady with the palm frond, proclaiming freedom throughout the city from atop Gellért Hill, is just east of the Citadella. Standing 14m high, she was erected in 1947 in tribute to the Soviet soldiers who died liberating Budapest in 1945. But the victims’ names (previously in Cyrillic letters on the plinth) and the statues of the Soviet soldiers were removed in 1992 and sent to what is now called Memento Park. In fact, the monument had been designed by the politically ‘flexible’ sculptor Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl much earlier for the ultraright government of Admiral Miklós Horthy. After the war, when procommunist monuments were in short supply, Kisfaludi Strobl…
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Roosevelt Tér
Named in 1947 after the long-serving (1933–45) American president, Roosevelt tér sits at the foot of Chain Bridge and offers among the best views of Castle Hill in Pest. On the southern end of the square is a statue of Ferenc Deák, the Hungarian minister largely responsible for the Compromise of 1867, which brought about the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary. The statue on the western side is of an Austrian and a Hungarian child holding hands in peaceful bliss. The Magyar kid’s hair is tousled and he is naked; the Osztrák is demurely covered by a bit of the patrician’s robe and his hair neatly coifed. The art nouveau building with the gold tiles to the east is the …
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Applied Arts Museum
This museum owns a king’s ransom of Hungarian furniture dating from the 18th and 19th centuries, art nouveau and Secessionist artefacts, and objects related to the history of trades and crafts (glass making, bookbinding, goldsmithing, leatherwork etc). But only a small part of it forms the 400-piece ‘Collectors and Treasures’ permanent exhibit on the 1st floor. Most everything else makes up part of one of the four or five temporary exhibitions on display at any given time. A combined ticket (2500/1250/4500Ft per adult/student or child/family) will get you into everything. It’s a novel way to rake in the dosh – just make everything a temporary exhibit. Consider visiting th…
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Óbuda
Ó means 'ancient' in Hungarian; as its name suggests, Óbuda is the oldest part of Buda. The Romans established Aquincum, a key military garrison and civilian town north of here at the end of the 1st century AD, and it became the seat of the Roman province of Pannonia Inferior in AD 106. When the Magyars arrived, they named it Buda, which became Óbuda when the Royal Palace was built on Castle Hill and turned into the real centre.
Most visitors on their way to Szentendre on the Danube Bend are put off by what they see of Óbuda from the highway or the HÉV commuter train. Prefabricated housing blocks seem to go on forever, and the Árpád Bridge flyover splits the heart of t…
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Víziváros
Watertown is the narrow area between the Danube and Castle Hill that widens as it approaches Óbuda to the north and Rózsadomb (Rose Hill) to the northwest, spreading as far west as Moszkva tér, one of Buda's main transport hubs. Under the Turks many of the district's churches were used as mosques, and baths were built, one of which is still functioning. Víziváros begins at Clark Ádám tér, leading east from the square.
The street was named after the 19th-century Scottish engineer who supervised the building of the Széchenyi Chain Bridge (Széchenyi lánchíd). Clark also designed the all-important tunnel (alagút) under Castle Hill, which took eight months to carv…
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Museum of Fine Arts
The Museum of Fine Arts, on the northern side of Hősök tere, houses the city’s most outstanding collection of foreign art works in a building dating from 1906. The Old Masters collection is the most complete, with thousands of works from the Dutch and Flemish, Spanish, Italian, German, French and British schools between the 13th and 18th centuries, including seven paintings by El Greco. Other sections include Egyptian and Greco-Roman artefacts and 19th- and 20th-century paintings, watercolours, graphics and sculpture, including some important impressionist works. There’s usually a couple of excellent temporary exhibitions going on at any given time; a combined ticket (320…
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