House of Terror Museum

A museum in the building that housed the headquarters of both of Hungary's twentieth-century terrors, one after the other.

Andrássy út 60 was taken over by the Arrow Cross Party, the Hungarian fascist movement, in 1944. After the war the communist state security service moved into the same address and stayed until 1956. Interrogations and executions happened in the cellars under both regimes, and those cellars have been reconstructed and are part of the visit.

The museum opened in 2002. Its design is deliberately theatrical — a black steel frame around the roof that throws the word TERROR across the façade in sunlight, a Soviet tank in the entrance court, a wall of portraits of the dead — and that theatricality is part of why it is argued about. Critics say the balance between the two regimes is uneven and that the framing serves a present-day political argument. That dispute is itself worth knowing about before you go in.

It is not a museum for young children, and it is not a quick visit. The basement is genuinely difficult.

It sits on Andrássy Avenue, a short walk from the Opera and directly on the M1 metro line.