Vajdahunyad Castle

The castle was built for the Millennial Exhibition of 1896, which marked a thousand years since the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin in 895. Ignác Alpár designed a complex of 21 parts, officially the Historical Building Group, intended to present a thousand years of Hungarian architecture in three dimensions — Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque wings, each quoting emblematic buildings from across the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. The deadline and the cost meant it was raised mostly in wood and cardboard. The exhibition closed on 31 October 1896 and the temporary pavilions began to come down.

Protest from the public saved it. The National Hungarian Economic Association proposed keeping the building for the new Museum of Hungarian Agriculture, founded during the exhibition itself on 20 June 1896, and the city authorities gave way. The castle reopened to visitors on 12 September 1897 as the Royal Hungarian Agricultural Museum, its collections assembled, under a decree of the agriculture minister Ignác Darányi, from the millennial agricultural displays and from donations made during 1896.

The flimsy materials told against it. The structure became dangerous, it was closed on 27 July 1899 and pulled down in the same year, and the museum moved out to Kerepesi — now Rákóczi — út 72.

Artists, museum staff, the Ministry of Religion and Public Education and Darányi all pressed for a second castle, and in 1902 building began again to Alpár's plans, this time in stone and brick. The Gothic and Renaissance–Baroque wings were finished by 1904 and the Romanesque group by 1908; the museum moved back in 1904, and on 9 June 1907 Franz Joseph opened its exhibitions to the public. Dénes Györgyi completed the interiors in 1912.

The main block is a scaled-down copy of the castle of Vajdahunyad in Transylvania, the residence of the governor János Hunyadi and of Erzsébet Szilágyi, and it is from that front — the façade facing Heroes' Square — that the building takes its everyday name. Elsewhere the complex borrows the abbey portal at Ják, the ground plan of the church at Lébény, the clock tower of Segesvár and the Katherine Gate of Brassó. The Ják chapel is no mere replica: consecrated on 8 August 1915 and placed in the hands of the Roman Catholic church, it holds Mass every Sunday.

Miklós Ligeti's statue of Anonymus, the unnamed chronicler at the court of King Béla III, was set in the courtyard in 1903, and a niche in the outer wall carries a bust, added in 2003, of the Hungarian-American actor Béla Lugosi, who played Count Dracula in the 1931 film. The building still houses the Museum of Hungarian Agriculture, described as the largest agricultural museum in Europe.