Buda Castle History

Béla IV started building on the hill in the spring of 1247, five years after the Mongols had shown that Hungary’s timber forts were no defence. The fortress at the south-western end became a royal residence within decades.

Louis the Great moved his court here from Visegrád in the 14th century, Sigismund added the Fresh Palace and the Broken Tower in the early 15th, and Matthias turned it into a Renaissance court with an Italian chapel, a new palace and the Corvina library that visitors wrote home about.

None of it stands. After the Ottomans took Buda in 1541 the palace burnt out repeatedly, and when the Christian armies retook the city in 1686 they pulled the medieval walls down almost to their foundations. What survived was buried under the palaces that followed, until László Gerevich’s excavations from 1946 to 1950 found the Gothic hall, the chapel and the vaulted rooms that the Castle Museum now shows.

Go down into them. They are the only royal Buda you can stand in.

The palace you see began in the 18th century, when a Baroque residence was built for a monarch who never lived in it. The north wing facing the Danube is the oldest part still standing.

From 1766 it housed the governor, Albert of Saxe-Teschen, from 1777 to 1784 the university moved up from Nagyszombat, and for the next century and a half it was the home of the palatines who ruled Hungary for the Habsburgs.

Two national relics lived here too: the Holy Right, St Stephen’s mummified hand, from 1771 in the Sigismund Chapel, and the Holy Crown from the end of the 18th century until 1944.

The revolution of 1848 to 1849 brought the first modern siege. Görgey’s Hungarian army stormed the castle on 21 May 1849, and Franz Joseph, once the Habsburgs had won, had the damage repaired by 1856. After the Compromise of 1867 the hill became the seat of government, and in 1870 Ödön Széchenyi’s steam funicular opened to carry the officials up to it.

From 1890 the palace was extended to match the new capital’s ambitions. Miklós Ybl, the architect of the Opera House and the Castle Garden Bazaar, drew the plans; when he died in 1891 Alajos Hauszmann took over, tripled the palace’s size along the hill, and by 1905 had produced one of the largest royal residences in Europe, with a dome to crown it, the Riding Hall and the Guardhouse behind, St Stephen’s Hall inside, and Stróbl’s Matthias Fountain and Róna’s Prince Eugene in the courtyards.

Between the wars Regent Miklós Horthy lived here, and that sealed its fate. In the siege of Budapest the palace became the Germans’ last stronghold in the city, and in January 1945 it burnt for weeks.

In 1949 the communist leadership decided the ruin would house the party and the government. That plan died with the 1950s, and in 1957 the palace was given instead to museums.

The rebuild that followed, under István Janáky and from 1959 Lajos Hidasi, was a second destruction: Hauszmann’s Neo-Baroque facade was replaced by a plainer one, the interiors that the fire had spared were stripped out, the damaged dome was demolished and replaced by a taller, barer one, and the Riding Hall, the Guardhouse and the stables were pulled down.

The Castle Museum opened in the southern wing in 1967, the National Gallery under the dome in 1975, and the National Széchényi Library in the western wing in 1985, when the rebuilding was declared finished. It is this palace, not Hauszmann’s, that most visitors have photographed for the last fifty years.

The National Hauszmann Programme, launched in 2019, set out to put the pre-war palace quarter back from Hauszmann’s plans and photographs. The Riding Hall, demolished in 1950, was rebuilt between 2016 and 2019 and opened in 2021 with the Guardhouse beside it.

St Stephen’s Hall reopened on 20 August 2021 as the first palace interior restored exactly as it was. The Turul went off for restoration and came back by crane in December 2021, the fountains and the western gardens were redone, and in December 2022 work began on the palace itself, starting with the northern wing.

Then, on 16 September 2026, the government halted the palace’s reconstruction, sent the contractor away and ordered a review of the programme’s costs and purpose. Whether the rest of Hauszmann’s palace comes back was an open question when we checked. What is finished stays finished, and it is the reason to see the hill now.