The headquarters of both the fascist and the communist secret police, in the same building, presented as a single continuous horror.
Andrássy út 60 was the headquarters of the Arrow Cross, Hungary’s fascist party, from 1944, and then of the communist state security services — the ÁVO and later the ÁVH — from 1945 into the 1950s. People were interrogated, tortured and killed in the cellars under both. The museum opened in 2002 and keeps the building’s function as its subject.
The exterior tells you what you are approaching: a black blade of a canopy projects from the roofline, cut with the words TERROR, and casts the letters onto the façade when the sun is right. Photographs of victims cover the outer wall.
Inside
The route runs downwards. Upper floors deal with the Soviet occupation, the show trials, deportation, the collectivisation of the countryside, the propaganda apparatus and the 1956 uprising. There is a Soviet tank in the central atrium, with a wall of victims’ photographs rising several storeys behind it. A lift descends to the cellars extremely slowly while a video of a former executioner describing hangings plays inside it — a decision that is either the most effective thing in the museum or the most manipulative, depending on who you ask.
The cellars themselves are reconstructed: cells too low to stand in, a wet cell, a gallows.
The argument about it
The museum is not neutral and does not pretend to be. It was created under the first Orbán government and is often criticised — by Hungarian historians among others — for giving far more space to the communist period than to the Arrow Cross and the Holocaust, and for the way it handles Hungarian complicity in both. Others defend it as the first serious public reckoning with the communist decades.
It is worth going, and worth going informed. If you visit the Dohány Street Synagogue and the Holocaust Memorial Centre as well, you will have a fuller account than this building gives on its own.
Audio guides are available and the printed room notes are essential. It is emotionally heavy and not suitable for young children.
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.
Hospital in the Rock
An emergency hospital and nuclear bunker in the caves under Castle Hill, kept secret until 2002.