A millennium monument to the founders of Hungary, and the emptiest large space in the city.
Heroes’ Square was laid out for the millennium celebrations of 1896, marking a thousand years since the Magyar arrival. It is enormous, hard-surfaced and almost entirely empty, which makes it feel less like a square than a parade ground — which, at various points, is exactly what it has been.
At the centre a 36-metre column carries the Archangel Gabriel, holding the Hungarian crown and the apostolic cross. Around its base stand Árpád and the six other chieftains of the founding tribes, on horseback, looking deliberately fierce.
Behind them a semicircular colonnade holds fourteen statues of Hungarian rulers and figures. The line-up has been revised: five Habsburgs originally stood there and were removed after 1945, replaced by leaders of the independence struggles — Bocskai, Bethlen, Thököly, Rákóczi and Kossuth. Monuments here are rewritten as often as the history is.
What has happened here
In 1989, a quarter of a million people gathered in this square for the reburial of Imre Nagy, the reform communist prime minister executed after the 1956 uprising and buried face-down in an unmarked grave. That ceremony, in June of that year, is generally taken as the moment the old order in Hungary ended in public. If you stand in the square knowing only one thing about it, know that.
The two buildings
The Museum of Fine Arts on the left holds the international collection — Spanish old masters, including a very strong El Greco group, plus Raphael, Goya and a good Egyptian holding. Opposite, the Műcsarnok or Palace of Art is a temporary exhibition hall with no permanent collection.
Directly behind the square, Városliget begins: the City Park, with Vajdahunyad Castle, the Széchenyi baths and the zoo. The square is the doorway to all of it, which is the best reason to come here rather than an end in itself.
Underneath runs the M1, the little yellow metro built for the same millennium. It is the oldest underground railway on the European continent and still uses its original tunnel profile, which is why the carriages are so small.
More Landmarks
The Hungarian Parliament Building
The third-largest parliament building in the world, put up for a country that was about to lose two-thirds of its territory.
Fisherman's Bastion
A neo-Romanesque viewing terrace that has never defended anything, built purely so that Budapest could be looked at properly.
Széchenyi Chain Bridge
The first permanent bridge between Buda and Pest, and the thing that made them one city.