The third-largest parliament building in the world, put up for a country that was about to lose two-thirds of its territory.
It is easy to be cynical about the Országház. It was designed in 1885 for a Hungary at the height of its confidence, finished in 1904, and within sixteen years the country it was built to govern had lost two-thirds of its land and a third of its Hungarian speakers at Trianon. A building for an empire, delivered just in time for the empire to end.
Knowing that does not make it less impressive. Imre Steindl won the competition with a neo-Gothic design that borrows the silhouette of Westminster and the symmetry of a Baroque palace, and then made it enormous — 268 metres along the river, 691 rooms, a dome exactly 96 metres high. That number is not an accident. It refers to 896, the year the Magyar tribes are said to have arrived in the Carpathian Basin, and it is also the height of St Stephen’s Basilica, which was made to match. No building in Budapest may legally exceed it.
What the tour covers
You see perhaps a twentieth of the building: the grand staircase, the domed central hall, one of the two debating chambers, and the corridors where members once left their cigars in numbered holders outside the chamber. Those holders are still there, and they are the detail most people remember.
Under the dome sits the Holy Crown of Hungary, the coronation regalia used for eight hundred years, with a bent cross on top that nobody has ever straightened. It spent much of the twentieth century in American custody at Fort Knox and came home in 1978. Photography of it is not allowed and there are guards who mean it.
Getting in
You cannot simply walk up. Tours are timed, guided, and grouped by language, and you should book online well in advance — in July and August, several days ahead. Tickets are sold through the parliament’s own site; the visitor centre is underground on the Kossuth tér side.
Where to see it from
The building was designed to be looked at from the water and from the Pest bank opposite, which means the best views are not from the building at all. Walk the Buda embankment near Batthyány tér at dusk, when the floodlights come on and the whole thing is doubled in the river. The view from the Fisherman’s Bastion is the famous one and deserves its reputation.
A short walk south along the embankment brings you to the Shoes on the Danube Bank, sixty pairs of iron shoes marking where Arrow Cross militiamen shot Jewish Hungarians into the river in the winter of 1944 and 1945. It is a quiet memorial next to a very loud building, and the two are worth seeing in that order.
More Landmarks
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.
St Stephen's Basilica
Hungary's largest church, holding the mummified right hand of the king who converted the country.