Kőbánya

What it is

The name means "stone quarry", and that is exactly what it was. Limestone was cut here from the Middle Ages onward to build Pest, and the emptied galleries under the district — tens of kilometres of them — later became the cellars of one of Central Europe's larger brewing industries.

Anton Dreher bought in here in 1854 and the brewery defined the district for well over a century.

What is here

St Ladislaus Church, and this is the reason to make the trip. Ödön Lechner built it in 1897, and it is one of the clearest statements of what he was trying to do: a Hungarian architectural language built out of Zsolnay ceramic, folk-art motifs and a roof that behaves like embroidery. It is far less visited than his Applied Arts Museum and, to a lot of people, the better building.

Új köztemető — the New Public Cemetery, and specifically Plot 301. After the 1956 revolution was crushed, Imre Nagy and those executed with him were buried here in unmarked graves, several face-down, at the far edge of the cemetery. They were exhumed and reburied with honours in June 1989, at a ceremony that drew a quarter of a million people and is generally read as the moment Hungarian communism lost the argument. The plot is now a memorial.

The cellar system, parts of which are occasionally opened for events and tours.

What it is like

Working, unglamorous and genuinely lived-in: housing estates, industrial sheds, a market. Almost no visitors.

Who it suits

People who came to Budapest for architecture or for twentieth-century history, and who are willing to take the M3 out past the tourist map to get it.

The practical catch

Plot 301 is a long walk inside a very large cemetery — allow time and take the map at the gate. And treat it as what it is: a burial ground and a national memorial, not a photo stop.