Budapest Guide
Terézváros and Erzsébetváros
Terézváros (Theresa Town, the VI District) is home to the State Opera House, the Academy of Music and the Hungarian equivalent of Broadway, making it one of the most vibrant parts of the city. Its main thoroughfare, Andrássy út, marking the border between it and Lipótváros, is Budapest's longest, grandest avenue, running in a perfect straight line for two and a half kilometres up to Hősök tere and the Városliget. With its coffee houses and grey stone edifices laden with dryads, the avenue retains something of the style that made it so fashionable in the 1890s.
To the south of Király utca, the mainly residential Erzsébetváros (Elizabeth Town, the VII District) is composed of nineteenth-century buildings whose bullet-scarred facades, adorned with fancy wrought-ironwork, conceal a warren of dwellings and leafy courtyards. It is also traditionally the Jewish quarter of the city, which was transformed into a ghetto during the Nazi occupation and almost wiped out in 1944–45, but has miraculously retained its cultural identity. Its current resurgence owes much to increased contacts with international Jewry, and a revival of interest in their religion and roots among the eighty-thousand-strong Jewish community of Budapest, which had previously tended towards assimilation, reluctant to proclaim itself in a country where anti-Semitic prejudices linger. There is no better part of Pest to wander around, soaking up the atmosphere.
The stretch of Andrássy út up to the Oktogon – where it meets the Nagykörút (Great Boulevard) – is within walking distance of Deák tér, and the whole length of the boulevard is served by the metro. Trams and buses circle the Nagykörút almost 24 hours, and several trolleybus lines run through the two districts out to the Városliget.