Andrássy Avenue

Andrássy Avenue was laid out between 1872 and 1885 at the urging of Count Gyula Andrássy, the Hungarian prime minister — and later Austro-Hungarian foreign minister — who wanted Budapest to have a grand boulevard to rival Paris's Champs-Élysées or Vienna's Ringstrasse. Strict building regulations shaped what went up along it: palaces near the city-centre end were capped at three storeys with a uniform cornice line, giving the avenue its harmonised Neo-Renaissance look, while the stretch nearer City Park filled instead with freestanding villas built as weekend residences for aristocratic families.

The avenue was officially inaugurated in 1896 as part of Hungary's millennial celebrations, marking a thousand years since the Magyar tribes settled the Carpathian Basin, and it carries Andrássy's name in recognition of the role he played in pushing the project through. Today its 2.3 kilometres are protected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, valued as much for its uniform architecture as for what runs beneath it.

Beneath Andrássy Avenue runs the M1, continental Europe's first electric underground railway and the world's second-oldest metro line after London's. Built in just 21 months using cut-and-cover construction — workers dug up the street, built the tunnel a mere two to three metres below the surface, then paved it back over — it opened on 2 May 1896, with Emperor Franz Joseph I himself among the first passengers, riding in a specially built royal carriage now preserved in the Underground Railway Museum beneath Deák Ferenc tér.

Because the line was built by opening up the avenue itself rather than tunnelling deep beneath it, its stations sit almost directly under the street, decorated with the same white-and-brown Zsolnay tiles and ornate ironwork that mark the surface architecture above. The line's small, boxy yellow carriages still run today largely along their original 1896 route, and in 2002 the Millennium Underground was added to the UNESCO World Heritage listing alongside the avenue itself, recognised as one entwined piece of engineering and urban planning.

At Andrássy út 60 stands one of the avenue's grandest facades and darkest addresses: the building now known as the House of Terror was the headquarters of the fascist Arrow Cross Party during their brief, brutal rule in 1944, and then, after the war, of the communist secret police, the ÁVH, until 1956 — two opposed regimes using the same rooms, and reportedly the same basement cells, to interrogate and torture their opponents.

The avenue's midpoint, Kodály körönd, has its own uncomfortable footnote: during the Arrow Cross period it was briefly renamed after Adolf Hitler, before reverting after the war and later being named for composer Zoltán Kodály, who lived on the square for decades. Composer Franz Liszt spent his final years at Andrássy út 67, a short walk from the music academy that now carries his name.

Andrássy Avenue runs 2.3 kilometres in a straight line from the city centre out to Heroes' Square and City Park, an easy 30-to-45-minute walk if you don't stop, though most visitors take much longer once the Opera House, House of Terror and Franz Liszt Academy start pulling them off the pavement. Because the M1 metro runs beneath almost the entire route with stops every few hundred metres, there's no need to walk it end to end — hop on for a stretch and get off wherever the next landmark is, or simply ride it for the novelty of riding continental Europe's oldest underground line.

The avenue itself is a public street, open around the clock and free to walk, though individual buildings along it — the Opera House, the House of Terror, the Liszt Academy — charge separate admission for tours or performances. It's easiest to combine with Heroes' Square and City Park at one end, or St Stephen's Basilica and the Danube at the other, rather than treating it as a stand-alone stop.