Budapest Pest: Parliament to the Great Market

1. Hungarian Parliament Building

691 rooms, and the number 96 built into the height on purpose.

Start at the largest building in Hungary. It was begun in 1885 and finished in 1904, in a neo-Gothic style borrowed from Westminster but laid out symmetrically around a central dome. The number to know is 96. The dome is 96 metres high, and so is St Stephen's Basilica across the river — the two tallest buildings in the city are deliberately the same height, because no institution should stand above the other. The number itself points to 896, the year Magyar tribes are traditionally said to have settled the Carpathian Basin. The millennium of that date is why the building was commissioned. It holds the Hungarian crown jewels, and the scale is the point: 691 rooms and forty kilograms of gold leaf, built by a country that was then half of Austria-Hungary and wanted a parliament that said otherwise.

The inside is guided-tour only and sells out; book ahead if you want the crown. The riverside square in front is open and is where the building actually looks best.

2. Shoes on the Danube Bank

Sixty pairs of iron shoes, left exactly where the people who wore them stood.

Sixty pairs of iron shoes, 1940s styles, sized for men, women and children, bolted to the stone at the water's edge. In the winter of 1944–45 the Arrow Cross militia brought Jewish Budapesters to this embankment, made them take off their shoes — leather was valuable — and shot them into the Danube. The memorial, installed in 2005, puts nothing between you and that: no plinth, no figures, no height. Just the shoes, at ground level, facing the water. It is one of the most effective memorials anywhere, and part of why is that it is easy to walk past. There is no barrier and no queue. People leave candles and small stones in the shoes.

It is a grave marker in effect. Do not stand in the shoes or pose with them; stones and candles are the local way of leaving something.

3. St Stephen's Basilica

The right hand of a king who died in 1038, kept in a glass case.

The basilica took fifty-four years to build, partly because the dome collapsed in 1858 and they had to start that part again. It was finished in 1905, and at 96 metres it matches the Parliament exactly. In a chapel off the left side is the Holy Right — the mummified right hand of Stephen I, the king who converted Hungary to Christianity and died in 1038. It is displayed in a glass and gold reliquary, and a coin in the slot lights it for two minutes. On 20 August, Hungary's national day, it is carried through the streets in procession. Whatever you make of the relic, the pairing is the thing: a thousand-year-old hand in a building the same height as the parliament, in a country that spent the nineteenth century arguing about what it was.

Entry to the nave is by donation; the dome lookout and the Holy Right chapel are ticketed separately. The dome gives the best rooftop view on the Pest side.

4. Hungarian State Opera House

The emperor paid for it on one condition — that it be smaller than Vienna's.

Opened in 1884 on Andrássy Avenue, designed by Miklós Ybl in neo-Renaissance style, with Gustav Mahler as its music director for three seasons at the end of that decade. The story everyone tells is about its size. Emperor Franz Joseph is said to have funded it on condition that it not be bigger than the Vienna State Opera. It is indeed smaller — and it is widely held to have better acoustics, which is the kind of victory a city under someone else's crown learns to enjoy. The avenue it stands on is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in its own right, laid out in the 1870s as Budapest's answer to the Champs-Élysées, with the first underground railway on the European continent running beneath it.

5. Dohány Street Synagogue

The largest synagogue in Europe — and a graveyard in its courtyard, which is not supposed to happen.

Completed in 1859 and seating close to three thousand, this is the largest synagogue in Europe. The style is Moorish Revival with two onion-domed towers, and it looks more like a church than most synagogues do — a deliberate choice by a community asserting that it belonged to the city. In the courtyard there are graves. Jewish law does not normally permit burial at a synagogue, and these are there because of the winter of 1944–45, when the ghetto was sealed around this block and more than two thousand people who died of cold, hunger and shooting had to be buried where they were. Behind the building is a metal weeping willow, each leaf carrying a name. It stands over the mass graves.

Entry is ticketed and includes the museum and the memorial garden; men are given a kippah at the door. Closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays.

6. Great Market Hall

Zsolnay roof tiles outside, paprika and pickles inside.

The walk ends at the covered market of 1897, at the Pest end of the Liberty Bridge. The roof is tiled in Zsolnay ceramics from Pécs — the same glazed, coloured tiles that appear on the best Hungarian buildings of the period — and inside is a steel structure of the kind that was being built for railway stations everywhere at the time. The ground floor is food: paprika in every grade from sweet to fierce, salami, sausage, pickles in barrels, goose liver, honey, and the fruit and vegetables that the city actually buys. Upstairs is souvenirs and food stalls; downstairs is fish and a supermarket. It was built as part of a set of five municipal markets, designed to move Budapest's food trade off the streets and under cover. This is the biggest of them and the only one that became a destination in itself.

Closed on Sundays and shuts early on Saturdays. The ground floor is where locals shop and the prices say so; the upstairs stalls are for visitors.