Hungarian National Museum

The revolution rooms are the emotional centre of this museum, and the reason a good many Hungarians come. Take them first, while you are still fresh.

Room 12 holds the printing press with the Twelve Points hung above it, for the press freedom the revolution won in a morning, and the velvet armchairs of the first accountable Hungarian government, Count Lajos Batthyány’s among them. Look for Lajos Kossuth’s governor’s attire, a braided broadcloth atilla with straight red trousers, and Sándor Petőfi’s national cockade, kept beside the document that authenticates it.

The small things are the good ones. General Artúr Görgei, handed full military authority at thirty-one, was short-sighted and read his maps through a magnifying glass fixed to his sabre. Give the room twenty minutes.

Room 20 finishes the museum and it is the room people talk about afterwards. Sándor Mikus’s statue of Stalin in City Park was pulled down on the evening of 23 October 1956, the first day of the revolution, and torn apart. What the museum shows is the hand.

Around it: Imre Nagy’s pince-nez, which was with him in prison; the prison uniform of a prime minister’s son, set against a picture of the secret labour camp at Recsk; a piece of the barbed wire from the border Hungary opened to East Germans in 1989; the Kádár coat of arms taken off the party headquarters; and József Antall’s fountain pen, a gift from Felipe González.

The election posters of 1990 cover a wall at the end. This is the only part of the permanent route that runs up into living memory. Give it fifteen minutes even if the twentieth century is not what you came for.

Room 1 opens the Hungarian story with the Árpád period, and the best object in it is not Hungarian at all. The Monomachus Crown is seven semi-circular gold plates of Byzantine cloisonné enamel showing the emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, the empresses Zoë and Theodora, two dancing women, and the virtues Truth and Humility, with medallions of Saint Andrew and Saint Peter.

A plough turned it up in the 1860s at Nyitraivánka, now Ivanka pri Nitre in Slovakia. What it was actually for has never been settled.

The same room holds the aquamanilia, bronze water vessels cast as heads, hunters, centaurs, horses, lions and griffins, made first for washing hands at Mass and later for lordly tables. They are easy to stride past and worth two minutes.

The archaeology exhibition on the first floor runs from 400,000 BC to AD 804 across ten rooms, and the Iron Age room holds its finest object. The Gold Stag of Zöldhalompuszta was hammered out of a single gold plate in the late seventh or sixth century BC, in the Scythian animal style, and was once about 37 cm long. It came out of a burial mound in 1928 with a gold chain of lions, buttons and a pendant, and was probably a quiver ornament.

Next to it sits the smaller Stag of Tápiószentmárton, made of electrum.

Get close to the Zöldhalompuszta stag’s neck before you move on. There is another animal worked into it, and once you have found it you cannot stop seeing it.

The Roman stone collection is not on the main route. It sits in the cellar system under the southern courtyard, put there during the rebuilding of the late 1990s, and plenty of visitors never find it.

Down there is Pannonia in stone: urns, tombstones, sarcophagi, parts of small temple-shaped tombs, votive altars and building inscriptions. The marble sarcophagus of Apollo and Marsyas from Szekszárd is the piece to look for, there is a fountain nymph nearby, and a pair of VR glasses puts you on the mosaic floor of the banquet hall at Villa Baláca.

The Medieval Lapidary is separate, on the ground floor, running through the lower rotunda and the cafeteria and reached by a spiral staircase. Stones from Esztergom, Székesfehérvár and Dömös, Italian, German, Slavic and Jewish gravestones, Turkish tombstones carved with turbans, part of the bell collection. It is the one part of the museum you can sit in with a coffee.

The garden costs nothing, opens at 05:30 and stays open until 21:00 every day of the week, Monday included. The state bought the ground from the Batthyány family in 1813 and it stayed a bare outer courtyard until a public fund paid for a garden in the 1850s. Ármin Petz drew it as an English landscape garden, the first trees went in on 24 November 1855, and Miklós Ybl’s railings followed in 1865.

The monument in front of the portico is János Arany, by Alajos Stróbl, unveiled in 1893. Petőfi has no statue out here, only a plaque.

Under the trees are Ferenc Széchényi and Ottó Herman, busts of Kazinczy, Berzsenyi, Kisfaludy, Garibaldi and Wysocki, a copy of the Apollo Belvedere, a Roman sarcophagus, and a bronze model of the building with Braille for blind visitors.