Budapest History Museum

The second floor holds In Pursuit of Lost Times, which replaced the old Ancient Peoples, Antique Cultures exhibition and covers everything that happened here up to the Hungarian conquest. The oldest objects are knapped stone tools left by people living on this ground 50,000 years ago; the youngest were dropped by the conquering Magyars.

It is built as ten periods, each with one featured object standing for it, crossed by ten themes about how people actually lived. That structure is what saves it, because prehistory in most museums is a case of flints with a date on it.

Thirty to forty minutes is enough unless archaeology is your thing. Take it first, because this is the floor the staff clear earliest at the end of the day.

A thousand years of the city on the first floor, organised round one idea. Budapest has been destroyed and rebuilt over and over, and the light and shadow of the title are the building booms and the sieges in between.

The chronological half runs along a single winding corridor shaped like the Danube, from the Hungarian conquest through the medieval kingdom, the Ottoman century, the union of Buda, Pest and Óbuda, the Second World War and on to the end of communism. The themed rooms branch off it, and those are the better ones: who has lived in the city, how they lived, bathing culture, the vineyards that have gone, industry and trade.

This is the part of the museum that explains the city you are standing in rather than the palace you are standing on. If you only have two hours in the building, spend them here and in the basement.

Excavations on Szent György tér, where the Teleki Palace once stood, found a well cut down into the rock, and the hanging came out of the silt at the bottom of it, in the form of a crumpled mudball at a depth of about ten metres.

Cleaned, it turned out to be a silk worked in lozenge shields, the red and silver bars of the Árpáds set against the gold lilies of the Anjous on blue. The museum dates its burial in the well to the reign of Sigismund of Luxembourg, and thinks it hung in the court of one of the Anjou kings before that, Charles I or Louis I.

The museum counts it among its three greatest objects, and it is easy to miss on the first floor. Look at the leather shoes and other textiles from the same well too, in the cases beside it.

In 1974 a dig in front of the royal palace opened a sealed cellar under a medieval townhouse and found more than sixty reassemblable torsos and thousands of fragments. They are the work of first-rate masters from several parts of Europe, some painted, some religious and some secular, and their style goes back to the sculptors of the French royal court at the end of the 14th century.

Many of them came out of the ground unfinished, abandoned when the workshop broke up, and nobody has established why they were buried at all.

It is on the ground floor, on your way back towards the entrance, and the heads are small and in cases, so stand and look, don’t walk through. Give it twenty minutes, and look at the faces more than the labels.

Nothing else in Budapest has this. The basement isn’t a display about the medieval royal palace. It is the palace’s own cellar level, the southern wing that survived the sieges and the rebuildings overhead, dug out between 1948 and 1960 and restored room by room.

You walk through the original spaces: the chapel crypt, the Gothic Hall, the Albrecht Cellar that King Matthias built under an inner courtyard to store the court’s goods, and the Renaissance Room made out of two smaller cellars.

The displays in them are the court’s own things, coats of arms of the royal families, Matthias’s red marble carvings, reconstructed tiled stoves, and vessels and utensils from his table. There is a Corvina Library room with the court’s music playing, a room on hygiene in the Royal Cellar, a stone-carving workshop, the guards’ rest room and a 3D animation of the palace as it stood about 1500.

Give it an hour. It is also the one part of the museum a wheelchair cannot reach.

The grandest of the rooms the excavations gave back. It is a ceremonial hall from the time of King Sigismund, with a cellar of similar size beneath it and, once, a reception room with very high ceilings above. The museum thinks it served the queen’s court.

Go outside afterwards and find its window. The traceried Gothic window survives in the castle wall below the museum, and seeing the room from the inside and then its one surviving external feature from the path outside is the best five minutes the hill gives you for nothing.