Vajdahunyad Castle

A castle that is not a castle, built as a temporary exhibit and kept because people liked it too much to pull down.

Ignác Alpár designed it for the Millennium Exhibition of 1896 as a walk-through history of Hungarian architecture: a Romanesque section, a Gothic section, a Renaissance section and a Baroque wing, each copying identifiable features of real buildings from across the historic kingdom. The Gothic part reproduces elements of Hunyad Castle in Transylvania, which is where the name comes from.

The original was built of wood and cardboard and meant to last a summer. It was so popular that between 1904 and 1908 it was rebuilt permanently in stone and brick, on the same design.

The result is a genuine oddity — an authentic nineteenth-century building that is also a deliberate pastiche of four earlier centuries, standing on an island in the City Park's boating lake. It works far better than it has any right to, particularly reflected in the water.

Inside is the Hungarian Museum of Agriculture, the largest of its kind in Europe. In the courtyard sits the hooded statue of Anonymus, the unnamed royal notary who wrote the earliest Hungarian chronicle.

The grounds are free to walk through.