House of Terror Museum
The same address on Andrássy Avenue served two successive regimes — fascist, then communist — as a place to imprison, interrogate, and kill.
Coming soon on iOS — be first to walk Budapest offline.
Both the Arrow Cross Party and the communist secret police ÁVH ran operations from this building. The permanent exhibition covers Hungary's entanglement with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and the basement preserves the actual cells where the ÁVH held and tortured prisoners. The black exterior — blade walls, decorative entablature, granite footpath — was deliberately designed to make the building stand apart from everything else on Andrássy Avenue.
What to look for
- The black exterior structure: blade walls, decorative entablature, and granite footpath engineered to contrast sharply with neighboring buildings on Andrássy Avenue
- Basement prison cells left from the ÁVH's use of the building for detention and torture
- Side-by-side exhibits on the Arrow Cross Party and the ÁVH, the latter described as functioning like the Soviet KGB
Andrássy Avenue 60; budget extra time for the basement level, which requires a separate descent from the main exhibition floors.
House of Terror Museum is one of 37 sights worth the detour in Budapest, all bundled offline in Voyage GO — download the Budapest pack and it sits on your map with no signal, filling your travel passport the moment you walk past.
More to see in Budapest
- Hungarian Parliament BuildingA political manifesto in stone: Hungary's parliament was built to look like Westminster, on purpose, with 40 kg of gold inside.
- Buda CastleA palace first raised in 1265, severely damaged in the Siege of Budapest during World War II, and rebuilt by a communist government — the scars and the seams are the story.
- Széchenyi Chain BridgeThe bridge that stitched Buda and Pest into one city — designed in Britain, shipped in sections, and opened in 1849 as one of the world's longest spans.
- Heroes' SquareAt the far end of Andrássy Avenue, a monument built in 1896 fixes the Magyar conquest of 896 AD in stone — seven founding chieftains, national leaders, and the plaza where Hungary reburied Imre Nagy in 1989.
- AquincumMarcus Aurelius is believed to have written parts of the Meditations here — on the Roman empire's frontier, not in Rome.
- St. Stephen's BasilicaThe first King of Hungary's mummified right hand sits in a reliquary here — and the dome above you had to be torn down and rebuilt from nothing after it collapsed in 1858.