Buda Castle, rebuilt: what the Hauszmann programme brought back
Walk across Szent György tér today and some of the buildings around you are younger than your phone. Others are older than the city of Budapest. Here is how to tell them apart, and the architect whose plans connect them.
What you can see again today
Over the past decade the National Hauszmann Programme has been rebuilding lost parts of the castle from the original plans. Start with what you can see; the story of why they were lost follows below.
- St Stephen's Hall. Rebuilt and opened to the public on 20 August 2021. The neo-Romanesque room, which won a prize at the Paris Expo of 1900, is lined with Zsolnay pyrogranite: look for the reconstructed bust of St Stephen above the great Zsolnay fireplace, and the ceramic tiles copied from surviving fragments.
- The Riding Hall and the Csikós courtyard. Its foundation stone was laid in May 2016 and it opened to visitors in September 2021, finished ahead of schedule.
- The Main Guardhouse. Rebuilt on Szent György tér; today it holds a café, a restaurant and an exhibition space.
- The Honvéd Headquarters. Being rebuilt to its original height and form since autumn 2021. The dome was finished in March 2025: 15 metres tall and 9 metres wide, its tip more than 50 metres above Dísz tér. By December 2025 the façade was nearly complete, with carved stone pieces of up to five and a half tonnes. It is to house the Institute and Museum of Military History and to be open to the public. With the crane still up in September 2026, it had not opened yet.
- The Turul. The bronze bird by Gyula Donáth has stood at the corner of the fence by the Habsburg Gate since 1905, a sword in its claws, looking down at the Danube. It is five metres tall and seven metres from wingtip to wingtip, and its stone base carries the coat of arms of historic Hungary. It has been restored in a workshop on the Savoy terrace.
- The Habsburg Gate. The wrought-iron gate and the ornamental fence were made in the workshop of Gyula Jungfer to Hauszmann's plans. War damage was patched up in the 1970s and 80s; the gate, the fence and the steps are now being fully restored.
The information boards along the fences show each building before the war, in ruins, and as planned. They are in Hungarian and English, and they are the best free guide to the programme.
Seven centuries on one hilltop
The palace you see is the last of many. The royal court moved up onto Castle Hill between 1249 and 1255, and in the 14th century the Angevin kings built the first royal castle on the empty southern end of the hill, apart from the town. King Sigismund (1387–1437) gave Buda its first golden age with his Gothic palace; under Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490) it became a European centre of art and learning, with the famous Corvina library, a throne room, and bronze statues of Diana, Apollo and Hercules in front.
Then came the long fall. After the battle of Mohács in 1526 the palaces were looted and the statues shipped away down the Danube. When Buda was retaken in 1686, after 145 years of Ottoman rule, an English traveller found the palace, "once one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe", entirely in ruins. A modest Baroque palace rose in 1715–1724, and Maria Theresa enlarged it into a residence of 203 rooms. In the 1849 siege a shell set its roof on fire while crowds watched from the Pest bank. That damaged Baroque palace is what Miklós Ybl, and after him Alajos Hauszmann, set out to rebuild.
It looked nothing like today's palace. Maria Theresa's building, the "second Baroque palace", was closer to a large country house, and for a few years (1777–1784) it even housed a university, with an observatory tower where the dome stands now. After the 1867 Compromise, Budapest wanted to match Vienna, and the hill was turned from fortress into showcase: the funicular opened in 1870, and Ybl's Várkert Bazár on the slope below the palace was finished in 1883.
The man behind the name
Alajos Hauszmann (1847–1926) was one of the leading architects of the age of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy. In 1891, after the death of Miklós Ybl, he took over the design and building of the Royal Palace in Buda. Over the next 13 years he turned the Castle District into a real city centre: a new wing to the north, a dome over the middle, and around them a ring of offices, guardhouses, stables and gardens. He also taught at the technical university in Buda for more than four decades, and the palace work won him the Grand Prix at the Paris World Exhibition of 1900.
Ybl began the new palace in 1890 but completed only the wing facing Krisztinaváros (today the National Széchényi Library) before he died in January 1891. Hauszmann took over with a new plan. He kept the Baroque core facing the Danube (the walls of today's Budapest History Museum are still the 18th-century ones), added new wings to the north with the main entrance on Szent György tér, and lined them with state rooms in a row about 200 metres long. Around the palace he built the Main Guardhouse, the Riding Hall and the Stöckl Stairs.
When it was finished, around 1904–05, the palace front facing the Danube ran for 304 metres, with a row of state rooms that one historian of the castle says was matched only by Versailles.
The building boom reached the quieter, northern half of the hill too. On Szentháromság tér, next to Matthias Church, Sándor Fellner's Ministry of Finance filled a whole block by 1904. Further north, Samu Pecz's huge National Archives was finished only in 1923, after the architect's death; the papers of the day joked about its chimney, disguised as a tower: what kind of tower smokes?
What was lost
The siege of Budapest in 1944–45 left the palace a burnt-out shell. What followed was, for many buildings, worse than the war. The palace was rebuilt in a simplified form, with a new, much taller dome finished in 1963, and much of Hauszmann's decoration was not put back. Around it, buildings that could have been repaired were pulled down instead:
- The Riding Hall and the Main Guardhouse on Szent György tér survived the siege but were demolished.
- The Red Cross headquarters on the corner of Dísz tér, built in 1902 from Hauszmann's office's designs, was damaged in the war and demolished in 1946, although, as the information board puts it, it could have been saved.
- The Archduke Joseph Palace, a late-Baroque house enlarged into an archducal palace in the early 1900s, was hit by several shells in 1944 and blown up in 1968. A garden of ruins took its place in the 1980s. It is now being rebuilt from old photographs and plans: by spring 2026 most of its Szent György tér façade stood again, while the interiors were still under way.
- The Honvéd Headquarters on Dísz tér, built in 1895–1897 to plans by Mór Kallina on the site of an old barracks and a Lutheran church, was cut down to its first floor after the war and left standing for decades as a war memorial between Dísz tér and Szent György tér.
- St Stephen's Hall in the palace's south wing, a showpiece of Hungarian applied art, was completely destroyed in the Second World War.
After the siege: why they did not simply rebuild
The siege of 1944–45 swept almost everything away: of the 789 buildings on Castle Hill, only four came through undamaged. Why not put them back as they were? Historians give several reasons together. The country was in ruins and had other priorities for decades. The palaces were only 50 or 60 years old at the time, an age at which buildings are least valued, and they were burnt-out shells, not empty houses. And the new regime had no wish to restore monuments to royal, Habsburg and aristocratic Hungary.
So the restorers reached back past the Habsburgs to the Middle Ages, something already begun in the 1930s, when the Vienna Gate was rebuilt. Several of the castle's most familiar silhouettes, such as the Mace Tower, the Ferdinand Gate and the great southern rondella, are in fact reconstructions from the 1950s and 60s, and the destruction itself uncovered medieval treasures like the Gothic Hall and the crypt of the palace chapel.
For years nobody agreed what to do with the ruin. From August 1945 the architect István Kotsis proposed restoring the Danube front with an 18th-century-style tower instead of Hauszmann's dome; there were plans to clear the hill for housing, a holiday area, even a casino. None came to anything. After a long struggle the palace was rebuilt with a new, much taller dome, finished in 1963, while excavations uncovered the remains of the medieval palace below. A plan for the communist leader Mátyás Rákosi to move into the palace was dropped, and it became a home for culture instead: the Budapest History Museum opened in 1967, the National Gallery moved in from 1974 (its opening ceremony was on 12 October 1975), and the National Széchényi Library moved into the Krisztinaváros wing in 1985.
Why it divides opinion
Few building projects in Hungary split opinion like this one, and the argument is worth knowing before you walk it.
Supporters see it as repair. These buildings stood until the siege and the demolitions that followed; Hauszmann's plans and photographs survive; and empty lots on the hill are filled again with stone carving, ironwork and Zsolnay ceramics made by today's craftspeople. For them, putting back what war and neglect took away is the point.
Critics ask what exactly is being restored. A building put up in the 2020s from century-old plans is, they argue, a new building in historic dress, and some of the reconstructions recreate mainly the façades. The post-war layer of the castle, itself part of its history, disappears in the process, including fine modernist spaces such as the National Gallery's domed staircase hall. There is a practical problem too: when the palace became a museum, its state rooms and chapel were cut through with new floors and the new dome was placed elsewhere, so in places today's palace is almost a different building inside. Bringing back Hauszmann's palace would take far more than new façades. UNESCO, which lists the Buda Castle Quarter as World Heritage, has raised the issue several times. In 2025 its World Heritage Committee called the scale and pace of the programme a matter of "serious concern" and asked Hungary to reassess the full rebuilding of long-lost buildings in favour of reusing existing empty ones. In 2026 it repeated its concern, and asked that the evidence and reasons behind each reconstruction be explained clearly to visitors, and that the palace keep its cultural use and the district its residents.
The castle has seen the opposite approach too. After the war, where old houses were beyond saving, the gaps in the burghers' town were filled with modern buildings that kept to medieval and Baroque proportions, sometimes smaller than what stood there before. And in the 1970s a seven-storey modern hotel, today's Hilton, went up on the site of the old Jesuit college, right beside Matthias Church. Then as now, every generation has argued about how much of the new the old hill can take.
So when you stand in front of the Riding Hall, you are looking at both at once: a careful copy of something that was lost, and a question about how a city should treat its past. Look closely at the new stone and decide for yourself.
Where things stand in 2026
Work is not finished, and its pace has changed. In June 2026 the government ordered a review of the National Hauszmann Programme and the other Castle District projects, covering contracts, permits and what the buildings will be used for. In September work on Wing A of the palace was paused, and the ministry in charge said a new public tender would be launched to continue it. For now the focus there is on protecting the building. The review also covers how the finished buildings will be used, so check opening times before you go.
So if you walk the castle this autumn, expect fences and scaffolding next to freshly gilded gates. That mix is part of the story.
See it on the walk
Our Buda Castle & Royal Quarter tour stops at Szent György tér, where the Riding Hall, the Main Guardhouse and the boards are right in front of you, and passes the Turul and the Habsburg Gate on the way to the palace terrace. The story cards at each stop go deeper into what stood where.