The Heart of Hungary

Beyond the gorgeous façade of the Hungarian Parliament Building is an intriguing story of perseverance and tragedy. By Deborah Cooke.

Every great city has its signature building. In Sydney, it’s the Opera House. In Paris, the Eiffel Tower. In New York, the Empire State Building. In Budapest, that honour goes to the Hungarian Parliament Building, a monumental neo-Gothic masterpiece that has been the city’s most enduring symbol since its completion in 1902. As London’s Houses of Parliament – on which the building’s design was based – loom large over the Thames, so the towers and dome of the Hungarian Parliament dominate the Danube. In fact, one of the best places to take in its enormity and grandeur is from the river, particularly at dusk and in the evening, when it’s spectacularly lit. More than 600,000 people visit the Parliament building each year, and for good reason: in TripAdvisor’s Travellers’ Choice Awards in 2018, it outranks The Acropolis, Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue and even the Great Wall as one of the top 25 landmarks in the world. 

To understand the genesis and significance of the building to the Hungarians, or the Magyars as they call themselves, it helps to know a little of the country’s complex history. Hungary adopted Christianity at the turn of the first millennium, and, by dint of its eastern European location, considered itself the region’s bulwark against the spread of Islam. Despite that, the country fell to the might of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1500s and remained under Turkish rule until the powerful Austrian dynasty, the Habsburgs, helped oust the Turks during the 1680s and 1690s. But independence still eluded the Magyars. The Habsburgs effectively ruled the country until 1867 – brutally quashing a revolution in 1848-49 – when, under growing pressure for Hungarian independence, a Dual Monarchy was established with an agreement known as the Austro-Hungarian Compromise. It was against this background that Hungarian reformers, intellectuals and artists started pushing for the establishment of a new parliament building – an Országház, literally House of the Nation. The Hungarian poet Mihály Vörösmarty put it most succinctly: “The motherland does not have a house.” A site was chosen, and it couldn’t have been more pointedly anti-Austrian – on the Pest side of the city (the two cities of Buda and Pest were joined in 1873), opposite the Habsburg- occupied Royal Palace on the other side of the Danube.

In 1880, a design competition was held and Hungarian architect Imre Steindl was chosen from a field of 19. Inspired by London’s Houses of Parliament, Steindl’s vision was monumental – a neo-Gothic pile that would eventually cover an area of 18,000 square metres, stretch 268 metres long and 96 metres tall, with 691 rooms, some 20 kilometres of stairs. The founding stone was laid in 1885 and hopes were high that the building would be completed in time for Hungary’s 1,000th anniversary in 1896. Although it was inaugurated that year, the building didn’t officially open until 1902. Tragically, Steindl had gone blind during construction, and died just weeks before its official opening.

While the building is primarily neo-Gothic in style, Steindl’s design incorporated many different architectural motifs, including Renaissance and Baroque. The striking dome is considered a Renaissance-style masterpiece. The 27-metre-high Dome Hall forms the centrepoint of the structure, uniting the north and south wings. Although incredibly ornate itself, the hall’s star attraction is the Holy Crown of Hungary, the Byzantine-style coronation crown that had been placed on the heads of the nation’s kings since the 12th century. (It has a fascinating history of its own, including being buried in a forest by the leader of the unsuccessful 1848 revolution, Lajos Kossuth; recovered by US military forces in Austria at the end of WWII; and being stored at the United States Bullion Depository in Fort Knox until 1978, when it was eventually returned to Hungary by US President Jimmy Carter.)

For those fond of numbers and figures, the Országház is hugely interesting. To begin with, its estimated cost when construction started was 18.5 million crowns (in 1900, about US$8.6 million) – but the final figure was closer to 38 million crowns (US$17.8 million). Some 40 million bricks and 40 kilograms of gold were used in its construction, along with 500,000 carved ornamental stones used to decorate the walls. Steindl also included numerical symbology within his design. The height of the dome, for instance, is 96 metres, which represents the year the Hungarian state was founded, 896. There are 96 steps in the spectacular main staircase as well, while the building has a total of 365 towers, one for each day of the year.

For the first 40 or so years of its history, the Hungarian Parliament Building stood as a beacon of Hungary’s independence, the symbol of a country experiencing economic and cultural growth. But the onset of WWII would mark the beginning of a tragic period in history. Hungary, which sided with the Axis powers during the war, had already lost some 200,000 soldiers as it battled the Soviet Union when, on Christmas Eve 1944, the Red Army surrounded ‘The Pearl of the Danube’. So began the infamous 50-day Siege of Budapest. By February, it’s estimated that 160,000 people had been killed on both sides, including 38,000 civilians. The Russians decimated the city: 32,000 buildings and all the bridges were destroyed.

Fortunately, the Parliament Building remained relatively unscathed, although it was heavily littered with bullet holes, most of which were mended during renovations in 2013. More tragedy followed in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution, an uprising against the Soviet-backed Hungarian People’s Republic, during which 2,500 Hungarians died and 200,000 fled. The most infamous incident occurred at the Országház, when a peaceful student protest outside the building turned bloody. Students were fired upon by the State Security Police and one student died, adding fuel to the uprising.

More than half a century later, as hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to the Hungarian Parliament Building, it’s important to remember that beyond its striking architectural significance, the Országház also holds memories of a history both complex and tragic. Explore Budapest today on the Best of the Balkans tour.