13 Best Sights in Hungary

Across Heroes’ Square from the Műcsarnok and built by the same team of Albert Schickedanz and Fülöp Herzog, the Museum of Fine Arts houses Hungary’s best art collection, rich in Flemish and Dutch old masters. With seven fine El Grecos and five beautiful Goyas as well as paintings by Velázquez and Murillo, the collection of Spanish old masters is probably the best outside Spain. The Italian school is represented by Bellini, Giorgione, Correggio, Tintoretto, Titian, and Caravaggio masterpieces and, above all, two superb Raphael paintings: the Esterházy Madonna and his immortal Portrait of a Youth, rescued after a world-famous art heist. Nineteenth-century French art includes works by Delacroix, Pissarro, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Renoir, and Monet. There are also more than 100,000 drawings (including five by Rembrandt and three studies by Leonardo), and Egyptian and Greco-Roman exhibitions. The special exhibits are outstanding and frequent. Labels are in both Hungarian and English; there’s also an English-language booklet for sale about the permanent collection.

The museum honors the work of Impressionist Károly Ferenczy (1862–1917), an important leader in the Nagybánya Artist Colony and a Szentendre native. There are a number of his artworks on display, though many of his most famous are in Budapest's Hungarian National Gallery. The exhibition also features the work of his three children, all of whom were popular artists of the early modern era: the expressionist painter Valér, the pioneering tapestry artist Noemi, and the sculptor and graphic artist Beni.

Your ticket also includes entry into a handful of other town museums and galleries, including the Kmetty Múzeum and the Kovács Margit Ceramic Museum.

In 1923 patron of the arts Ferenc Hopp bequeathed his home and a 4,000-piece private collection to the creation of a public exhibition space, and to this day it remains the country’s only Asian art museum. Visitors can enjoy a turn-of-the-century aristocrat’s home while perusing the collection's 30,000 items, spanning from Japan to the near East. Visiting exhibitions are always paired thematically with objects existing in the local collection, adding an interesting perspective. The small eastern-Asian-style garden space surrounding the museum is free and open to the public throughout the day.

Considered by many to be Hungary's finest art gallery, the Christian Museum is located in the Primate's Palace in the pretty riverside Víziváros district. It's home to the country's greatest collection of medieval Hungarian religious art, as well as Dutch, German, and Italian master paintings; the 14th- and 15th-century Italian collection is unusually large for a museum outside of Italy. The museum's showstopper is the intricately carved 15th-century Holy Sepulchre of Garamszentbenedek, depicting the 12 Apostles clustered around Christ's tomb, which was wheeled through the town during Easter processions. You can reach the museum from the basilica via the steep Macskalépcső, or Cat Stairs.

If you have time for only one of Szentendre's myriad museums, make it this extraordinary exhibition showcasing the works of a renowned Budapest ceramics artist. Margit Kovács, who died in 1977 aged 74, left behind a wealth of richly textured works that range from ceramic figurines to life-size sculptures and draw inspiration from folk history, Christianity, and 20th century life. Look out for the tiny but wonderful Beggar Woman with Forget-Me-Not Eyes, half-hidden in a wall recess. Your ticket includes entry into the Ferenczy and Kmetty Museums, along with a few other locals museums and galleries.

The brainchild of Irene and Peter Ludwig, the Ludwig Museum at Müpa is Hungary’s only museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary art. Set in the Müpa Budapest cultural center, the Ludwig houses a significant collection of modern international and Hungarian fine art over three floors in the wing closest to the Danube. While focusing on Eastern and Central European art, it also puts a special emphasis on presenting Hungarian art of the '60s to the present day in an international context.

This eight-story neo-Renaissance building was commissioned by photographer Manó Mai and presents a fascinating history of Hungarian photography. Imperial and royal court photographer at the turn of the 20th century, Mai worked and lived here throughout his life. Today, this building features the only intact turn-of-the-century studio house, which has recently been renovated for use. The three stories of exhibition space display an eclectic selection of photographic works, mostly featuring contemporary artists, but sometimes classic works of art, too. Don’t leave without having a coffee and cake at the gorgeous Mai Manó Café on the ground floor---either sit inside enjoying the Moroccan mosaic-tiled walls or sit outside to watch the theater crowds come and go from the Moulin Rouge across the street.

This is the former home of extraordinary Art Nouveau and Art Deco master stained-glass artist Miksa Róth, whose work can be found on the Parliament, St. Stephen’s Basilica, and the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music. It is essentially a three-room residential apartment filled with collections of his work, objects from his everyday life, and other art from the period. They also regularly holds talks, classes, and guided tours related to the artist and the arts in general.

The Műcsarnok contemporary arts hall moved to its current location, a building designed and built specifically to house it, in 1896 as part of the Millennium Exhibition celebrations that changed Budapest’s park forever. Its stark neoclassical structure and Greek revival portico set this handsome building apart from its surroundings. Light pours in from the skylights to show off the fine marble work inside. After several incarnations, the space now functions as a Kunsthalle, an artist collective that hosts several cutting-edge temporary art exhibits throughout the year. The building also functions as the headquarters of the Institution of the Hungarian Academy of Arts.

Founded in 1954 as the national museum of 19th- and 20th-century Hungarian literature, this lovely venue—named after Hungary's most famous poet of the 1848 revolution, Sándor Petőfi—is well worth a visit regardless of what you know (or don't know) about the local literary scene. There's limited English-language information—and only in the permanent exhibition, not the temporary ones—but the audiovisual readings of Petőfi's poems are still soul-stirring. Besides, even if the exhibits are best suited to Hungarian speakers, the setting is the ravishing neoclassical Károlyi Palota (Károly Palace), which has some grand staircases and stunning rooms filled with period furniture—all free to visit with a museum ticket. And behind the palace is the lovely, flower-filled Károlyi Kert (Károly Garden), a pleasant spot for a post-exhibition amble.

When entering the palace, look down at the "cobblestone" floor, as closer inspection reveals it's actually made of wood. The owner got fed up with being awakened by horses hooves.

Robert Capa was a Hungarian photographer whose images of war made him one of the greatest photojournalists of the 20th century. Born in 1913 in Budapest, Friedmann Endre Ernő took on the more American-sounding Robert Capa alias when he was working in Paris. In 1936, he was sent to cover the Spanish Civil War and it was here that he shot one of his most famous photos, "Death of a Loyalist Militia Man, Spain, 1936." Capa is particularly well-known for his photos of World War II and the D-Day landings in Normandy, and for being a cofounder of Magnum Photos in Paris. In 1954, Capa was photographing for Life in Thái Bình, Vietnam, when he stepped on a land mine and was killed. This photography center named for Capa and housed on the second floor of a lovely old downtown villa honors his incredible legacy as an exhibition space that focuses primarily on press and documentary photography, and supports the preservation of Hungarian press photography. There is also a small permanent collection featuring Capa’s work. The local exhibitions are always extremely well curated and there are occasional but prestigious international exhibitions here throughout the year.

The pioneer of Op Art (who left Hungary as a child and spent the rest of his life in Paris), Victor Vasarely was born Gyozo Vásárhelyi in 1908 in this house, which has been turned into something wild, as much a fun house as a museum. The first hall is a corridor of 3D visual tricks devised by his disciples, at the end of which hangs a hypnotic canvas of shifting cubes by Jean-Pierre Yvaral. Upstairs, the illusions grow profound: a zebra gallops by while chess pieces and blood cells seem to come at you.

If you haven't had your fill of Zsolnay, make a beeline for this museum. Occupying the upper floor of the oldest surviving building in Pécs, which dates from 1324 and has been built and rebuilt over the years in Romanesque, Renaissance, and Baroque styles, this museum is a merry show-and-tell waltz through a revolution in pottery that started in 1851. That's when local merchant Miklós Zsolnay bought the site of an old kiln and set up a stoneware factory for his son Ignác to run. Ignác’s brother, Vilmos, a shopkeeper with an artistic bent, bought the factory from him in 1863, imported experts from Germany, and (with the help of a Pécs pharmacist for chemical glaze experiments and his daughters for hand-painting) created the distinctive namesake porcelain. Today, the museum's collection includes Vilmos’s early efforts at Delft-blue handmade vases, cups, and saucers; his two-layer ceramics; examples of the gold-brocade rims that became a Zsolnay trademark; and table settings for royal families. Look up on your tour to see the unusual Zsolnay chandeliers lighting the way.