An emergency hospital and nuclear bunker in the caves under Castle Hill, kept secret until 2002.
Castle Hill is riddled with natural caves in the limestone, extended and connected over centuries into a system running beneath the whole district. In the late 1930s, with war coming, part of that system was converted into an emergency surgical hospital.
It was fully operational during the siege of Budapest in the winter of 1944–45, built for about sixty patients and holding many hundreds. Conditions were what you would expect: water rationed, ventilation failing, operations by torchlight, the dead carried out into a hill under bombardment.
It was used again during the 1956 uprising, taking wounded from the street fighting. Then in the early 1960s it was refitted as a nuclear bunker, equipped with air filtration and water storage, and kept in operational readiness. It remained an official secret — maintained by a family who lived above it and told no one — until it was declassified and opened to the public in 2002.
The tour
Entry is by guided tour only, in fixed time slots, in Hungarian and English and sometimes other languages. It runs about an hour and covers the wards, the operating theatres, the generator room and the bunker equipment. Much of it is furnished with wax figures, which sounds tacky and is in practice quite effective — the scale of how many beds fit into a small rock chamber lands better with bodies in them.
The nuclear section includes decontamination showers, the air-filtration plant and a display on Hungary’s civil defence planning. There is a section on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that some visitors find abrupt in context.
Practicalities
Book ahead in summer; slots fill. It is cold, around 16°C, and there is a lot of standing on uneven floors. Photography is not permitted inside, which is unusual and strictly enforced.
The entrance is on Lovas út, on the western side of Castle Hill and below the level of the main streets, and is easy to walk past.
More Museums
Hungarian National Museum
The national story from the Roman period to the end of communism, in the building where the 1848 revolution began.
Museum of Fine Arts
The international collection: a remarkable group of Spanish paintings, a good Egyptian holding, and a hall of plaster casts.
House of Terror
The headquarters of both the fascist and the communist secret police, in the same building, presented as a single continuous horror.