Budapest stacks 2,000 years on top of each other: a Roman provincial capital in Óbuda, a Turkish holy grave on Rózsadomb, and Andrássy út addresses where two dictatorships kept the same cellars. Three days, three eras.
Capital of Pannonia Inferior, once 40,000 people. Walk the grid of streets, the painted bath houses and the reconstructed water organ of AD 228 — the only Roman hydraulis ever found. Open Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
Built around AD 145 for the Legio II Adiutrix, its arena floor is larger than the Colosseum's and held some 13,000 spectators. It survives sunken in a traffic island on Pacsirtamező utca, unfenced and free to walk into.
The neoclassical 1847 hall where Sándor Petőfi's generation set off the revolution of 15 March 1848. Inside: the 11th-century Monomachos crown, Árpád-era goldwork and the medieval Hungary galleries. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
The oldest building in Pest, raised over the grave of Bishop Gellért in 1046. A Romanesque core, Gothic sedilia niches, and in the sanctuary wall an Ottoman mihrab left in place from the decades when it served as a mosque.
One address, two terrors: Arrow Cross headquarters from 1944, then ÁVH secret police until 1956. A lift descends at walking pace to the reconstructed cellar cells while a former warder describes the executions. Tue–Sun 10:00–18:00.
Sixty pairs of cast-iron 1940s shoes by Gyula Pauer and Can Togay mark the quay where Arrow Cross militia shot Jewish Budapesters into the river in the winter of 1944–45, ordering them to undress because leather had value.
A 2,300 m² surgical hospital cut into the caves under Castle Hill, operating through the 1945 siege and the 1956 uprising, then converted into a nuclear shelter. Guided tours on the hour, wax figures filling the wards.
The Habsburgs built the Citadella fortress in 1854 with its guns pointed down at the city that had just rebelled in 1848. The 14-metre bronze Liberty Statue above it went up in 1947; its Soviet soldier was removed in 1992.
Europe's largest synagogue, 3,000 seats, built 1854–59 by Ludwig Förster in Moorish-Byzantine brick. Behind it lie the mass graves of 2,281 ghetto dead and Imre Varga's silver weeping willow, each leaf a name.
Otto Wagner's only building in Budapest, an octagonal Moorish temple of 1872 for the Status Quo Ante congregation, reopened after restoration in 2021. In 1941 it was used as a holding pen for deportees sent to Kamianets-Podilskyi.
Fifty-six hectares opened in 1847, holding the mausoleums of Kossuth, Deák and Batthyány, the graves of the 1956 executed, and a Communist labour-movement pantheon with vast mosaics. Open daily 07:00 until dusk.
The northernmost Muslim pilgrimage site in Europe: the octagonal 1548 tomb of a Bektashi dervish who died during the Ottoman capture of Buda in 1541, ringed by a rose garden and a terrace over the Danube bend.