Timeline of Budapest

A Roman fort on the Danube. A cavalry fort is established at Aquincum, in what is now Óbuda, as part of the fortified frontier along the river. A civil town grows beside it.

Aquincum becomes a provincial capital. Hadrian, then governor, makes it the seat of Pannonia Inferior. At its height it holds thirty to forty thousand people, with an amphitheatre, baths and piped water.

Rome withdraws from the Danube. The frontier collapses and Aquincum is abandoned. Huns, Avars and Slavs pass through the basin over the following centuries.

The Magyar conquest. Seven tribes under Árpád cross the Carpathians and settle the basin. The date is fixed in Hungarian public memory and is why the Parliament dome and St Stephen’s Basilica are both exactly 96 metres high.

Stephen is crowned. Vajk, baptised István, receives a crown recognised by the Pope and makes Hungary a Christian kingdom. He is canonised in 1083; his mummified right hand is now in St Stephen’s Basilica.

Bishop Gellért is killed. The Italian missionary is murdered during a pagan uprising — sealed in a barrel and rolled off the hill that now carries his name, according to tradition.

The Mongols destroy the towns. Batu Khan’s army devastates Hungary. Perhaps a quarter of the population dies. Pest is burned; the survivors flee across the river.

Béla IV fortifies Castle Hill. Returning after the Mongol withdrawal, the king orders walled towns on defensible ground. The street plan laid out on the hill is still the one you walk today.

Buda becomes the capital. Louis I moves the royal seat here permanently from Visegrád.

Matthias Corvinus takes the throne. His Buda court becomes one of the great Renaissance centres north of Italy, with the Bibliotheca Corviniana among the largest libraries in Europe.

Defeat at Mohács. The Ottoman army destroys the Hungarian forces in under two hours and King Louis II drowns fleeing the field. The kingdom begins to come apart.

Buda falls to the Ottomans. Suleiman takes the city by a ruse rather than a siege. Hungary is divided three ways: Ottoman centre, Habsburg west and north, and a semi-independent Transylvania.

The bathhouses are built. Ottoman governors exploit the thermal springs, raising the Rudas, Király and Császár baths. Rudas and Király are still in use four and a half centuries later.

The recapture of Buda. A Holy League army retakes the city after a siege of more than two months. Buda is left in ruins and its population reduced to a few thousand.

Rákóczi’s war of independence. Ferenc Rákóczi II leads an eight-year rising against Habsburg rule. It fails, and he dies in exile in Ottoman Turkey.

The university moves to Buda. Founded at Nagyszombat in 1635, it is relocated by Maria Theresa and later to Pest, where it becomes Eötvös Loránd University.

The Great Flood. The Danube breaks its banks and destroys more than half the houses in Pest. The rebuilding that follows produces the neoclassical city centre.

Revolution begins in Pest. A crowd gathers at the National Museum, the Twelve Points are printed on a press seized for the purpose, and Petőfi’s National Song is read. The date is now a national holiday.

The Chain Bridge opens. The first permanent crossing between Buda and Pest, pushed through by Count István Széchenyi. It makes the union of the towns practical.

Surrender at Világos. The war of independence ends after Russian intervention on the Habsburg side. Thirteen generals are executed at Arad; a decade of repression follows.

The Citadella is built. The Habsburgs fortify Gellért Hill and point its guns at the city below. It never fires on Budapest and never needs to.

The Compromise. Austria-Hungary is created and Franz Joseph is crowned King of Hungary in Matthias Church, with a coronation mass written by Liszt. Hungary gains its own government and its capital begins to boom.

Buda, Pest and Óbuda unite. The three towns become Budapest. The population will quadruple over the next fifty years.

The Opera House opens. Miklós Ybl’s building is finished with money from Franz Joseph, on condition it be no larger than Vienna’s. It is not larger, and it is better finished.

The millennium. A thousand years since the conquest is marked with Heroes’ Square, Vajdahunyad Castle, the exhibition in the City Park, and the M1 — the first underground railway on the European continent.

The Great Market Hall opens. One of five covered markets built to bring the city’s food trade indoors, with a Zsolnay tile roof over a steel frame.

Parliament is completed. Imre Steindl’s building is finished after nineteen years, with 691 rooms and a dome 96 metres high. Steindl had gone blind and died the year before.

The Széchenyi baths open. Thermal water is drawn from over a kilometre down into what becomes the largest medicinal bath complex in Europe.

The Aster Revolution. Austria-Hungary collapses and a Hungarian republic is declared under Mihály Károlyi.

The Hungarian Soviet Republic. Béla Kun’s communist government holds power for 133 days before Romanian troops enter Budapest. A White Terror follows under Miklós Horthy.

The Treaty of Trianon. Hungary loses two-thirds of its territory and a third of its Hungarian speakers to neighbouring states. No event in modern Hungarian history is more present in its politics.

Germany occupies Hungary. Within weeks the deportation of Hungarian Jews begins — over four hundred thousand people in under two months, most to Auschwitz.

The Budapest ghetto is sealed. Some seventy thousand people are confined to the streets around the Dohány Street Synagogue. Arrow Cross militiamen shoot thousands into the Danube over the winter.

The siege of Budapest. Fifty days of encirclement and street fighting destroy around four-fifths of the city’s buildings. Every bridge over the Danube is blown by the retreating German army.

The People’s Republic. Mátyás Rákosi consolidates Stalinist rule: show trials, forced collectivisation, and a secret police with reach into every workplace.

The uprising. Students march to Parliament; a crowd cuts the Stalin statue off at the ankles. Imre Nagy declares neutrality. Soviet armour returns on 4 November and crushes it. Around 2,500 die and 200,000 leave the country.

Imre Nagy is executed. After a secret trial he is hanged and buried face-down in an unmarked grave. János Kádár will run Hungary for another thirty-one years.

The New Economic Mechanism. Limited market reforms begin what becomes known as goulash communism — the most comfortable standard of living in the bloc, in exchange for silence about 1956.

Nagy is reburied. A quarter of a million people gather at Heroes’ Square. A young Viktor Orbán demands the withdrawal of Soviet troops. The old order ends in public.

The border is opened. Hungary lets East German refugees cross to Austria, beginning the sequence that ends at the Berlin Wall two months later.

The Republic is declared. The date is chosen deliberately: the anniversary of the uprising.

Hungary joins the European Union. It had joined NATO five years earlier. Budapest’s centre is progressively restored over the following two decades.

The M4 metro opens. The city’s first new metro line in decades, and the most architecturally ambitious, running from Kelenföld under the river to Keleti.