Vajdahunyad Castle

This castle should have disappeared long ago. Its official name is the Historical Building Complex, and Ignác Alpár won the 1893 competition with a plan to capture a thousand years of Hungarian architecture in a single place. It became twenty-one parts, every one of them a recognisable quotation: the Romanesque gate of the abbey church of Ják, the keep of the real Vajdahunyad in Transylvania, the Apostles' Tower of Segesvár, a Renaissance wing, and a Baroque wing from the time of Maria Theresa.

Because the schedule was tight and the budget tighter, all of it went up out of beams, plaster and canvas, just like the rest of the exhibition grounds, and just like the rest it was meant to come down afterwards. When the moment arrived, the city refused to cooperate. Newspapers wrote against it, architects protested, visitors kept coming, and the agricultural association pushed to keep it. In 1902 Alpár started again, this time with stone and brick: by 1904 the Gothic and Renaissance wings were standing, and in 1908 the Romanesque part was finished too.

So what you see is the second version, on the same spot and in the same shape as the stage set of 1896. A rebuilt collection of buildings that never stood here themselves, in a style nobody ever really built, and yet this is now a protected monument in its own right. Inside sits the Agricultural Museum.

We walk through the gate into the courtyard, where a figure in a deep hood sits on a pedestal.