House of Terror (Andrássy út 60)
Why is it significant?
Stop opposite number 60 and look at the roofline. A heavy black frame has been fixed to the top of an ordinary neo-Renaissance apartment block, and the word TERROR is cut right through it, so that on a sunny day its shadow falls across the facade.
Key Facts
| Place | House of Terror (Andrássy út 60) |
|---|---|
| Address | Andrássy út 60, 1062 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.50690, 19.06500 |
| Part of Walk | Budapest's Musical Boulevard: Andrássy Avenue from the Opera to Heroes' Square |
| Generated | Generated |
Stop opposite number 60 and look at the roofline. A heavy black frame has been fixed to the top of an ordinary neo-Renaissance apartment block, and the word TERROR is cut right through it, so that on a sunny day its shadow falls across the facade. Along the pavement, small photographs of faces line the wall.
In 1944 this building became the headquarters of the Arrow Cross, Hungary's fascist party, which seized power that October. Its members called it the House of Loyalty. In its cellars they imprisoned and tortured people, and during the winter of 1944 and 1945 Arrow Cross militias murdered thousands of Budapest's Jews, many of them on the banks of the Danube.
Then, after the war, the cellars did not fall silent. The new communist political police moved into the same building, the organisation later known as the ÁVH, and used it to interrogate and break opponents until the mid-1950s. Two dictatorships, one address. That is the idea behind the museum that opened here in 2002, with a Soviet tank in the atrium and the reconstructed cells in the basement.
The museum has always been debated. Critics argue that its displays give far more space to communist crimes than to the Holocaust and to Hungarian responsibility for it, and historians have argued about it in public for years. Visitors, meanwhile, keep coming. Whatever you think of the presentation, the building itself is the evidence: you are looking at the real door through which people were brought in.
The avenue around you carries its own scars in its names. Laid out in the 1870s as the Sugárút, the Radial Road, it became Andrássy út after the statesman Count Gyula Andrássy. Under communism it was renamed Stalin Avenue, then Avenue of the People's Republic, and only in 1990 did it get its old name back. Just a few steps further on, on the corner of Vörösmarty utca, an old academy building waits, where Liszt spent his last winters.