Budapest Guide
Lipótváros and Újlipótváros
Parliament
Opening time: Tours daily at 10am, noon & 2pm
Price: Free for EU citizens with passport, otherwise 2640Ft
Address: Ticket office at Gate X on the Kossuth tér side
Website: www.mkogy.hu
The Hungarian Parliament building (Országház) makes the Houses of Parliament in London look humble, its architect Imre Steindl having larded Pugin's Gothic Revival style with Renaissance and Baroque flourishes. Sprawling for 268m along the embankment, its symmetrical wings bristle with finials and 88 statues of Hungarian rulers, surmounted by a dome 96m high (alluding to the date of the Magyar conquest). One weakness in the design was the white limestone of the exterior, which has been degraded by the elements and pollution; since 1925 it has required almost constant cleaning and replacement.
For centuries, Hungarian assemblies convened wherever they could, and it wasn't until 1843 that it was resolved to build a permanent "House of the Motherland" in Pest-Buda (as the city was then called). By the time work began in 1885, the concept of Parliament had changed insofar as the middle classes were now represented as well, though over ninety percent of the population still lacked the right to vote. The introduction of multiparty democracy in 1990 was symbolized by the removal of the red star from Parliament's dome and the replacement of Communist emblems by the traditional coat of arms featuring the crown of King Stephen – whose Coronation Regalia is now on show in the building's Cupola Hall.
Inside, guards holding drawn sabres flank the Coronation Regalia, whose centrepiece, St Stephen's Crown, has symbolized Hungarian statehood for over a thousand years. It consists of two crowns joined together: the cruciform crown that was sent as a gift by Pope Sylvester II to Stephen for his coronation in 1000, and a circlet given by the Byzantine monarch to King Géza I. The distinctive bent cross was caused by the crown being squashed as it was smuggled out of a palace in a baby's cradle. At other times it has been hidden in a hay-cart or buried in Transylvania, abducted to Germany by Hungarian Fascists and thence taken to the US, where it reposed in Fort Knox until its return home in 1978, together with Stephen's crystal-headed sceptre, a fourteenth-century gold-plated orb and a sixteenth-century sword made in Vienna, used by his successors.