Five hundred years of Hungarian history stacked onto a single hill, where almost nothing still stands the way it was meant to.
A week spent waiting for the ice to clear cost Széchenyi his father's funeral and gave the city its first permanent bridge.
A Hungarian origin myth, set in place by a dynasty from Vienna.
Four palaces have stood here, and not one of them died of old age.
The building across the water was designed for a country twice the size.
In this yellow palace, a prime minister wrote his final letter.
The emptiest square in the quarter, and that emptiness is the trace the war left behind.
A shopping arcade beneath the palace gardens that never caught on, and spent twenty years as the country's rock venue.
An English insurer built a palace here, which later spent forty years falling to pieces.
Stone benches in the gateways, and nobody knows what they were for.
What looks like a fortress is actually a viewing terrace from around 1900.
A mosque for a hundred and forty-five years, then the church where an emperor became a king.
A whole neighbourhood once lay beneath this grass, with vineyards, taverns and hundreds of houses.
A plague column, a confectionery from 1827, and the way back down.
The ballroom that was shot to pieces from across the river, and the building that took its place.
A hospital inside the rock that officially didn't exist for forty years.
Sixty pairs of cast-iron shoes along the edge of the embankment, their toes pointing towards the water.
The inner city of Pest can be explored on foot in a single morning, and in that morning you'll pass a Roman bridgehead, a revolution that started at a café table, and a prayer niche from the Turkish era set into a church wall.
In March 1838 the ice jammed, half of Pest collapsed, and a baron took to a rowing boat.
A girl with a fish who moved from the fish market to a park, disappeared, and came back out of a warehouse, on a square named after a vanished giant.
The square where the same poem shaped history twice, with the church of the Greek merchants standing behind it.
A bank that filled its facade with glass and hung the nation's history above it, after an earlier design had stuck to money.
The white bridge above you is the second one; the first held the world record until 1926.
Beneath this street lies a synagogue that was found and then covered over again.
Nineteen designs, forty million bricks, and an architect who went blind before his building was finished.
An octagonal pool beneath an Ottoman dome, in use for more than four hundred and fifty years.
A walk along both banks of the Danube, past the buildings that nearly every visitor passes by without knowing what they're looking at.
The coffee house where the 1848 revolution began, which went by three names before it was torn down in 1913.
The tower stands on its own, because the church around it was cleared away after the war.
This is where the wall broke in 1686, and where the man who defended it still lies.