Most first visits to Budapest start at the river. This walk starts in the market instead, and spends a whole morning or afternoon on the Pest side, where the city of the nineteenth century still sets the scene: a covered market, a national museum, a synagogue, a music academy, an opera house and a basilica, all built within roughly seventy years of one another.
Taken together they tell the story of a city making itself a capital. The stops are close enough to link on foot, and several are worth going inside, so leave time for at least two of them. The walk ends at the top of a dome, which is the right place to see how far you have come.
1. Great Market Hall
The Great Market Hall opened in February 1897, designed by Samu Pecz on a steel frame that covers about 10,000 square metres. Look up before you go in: the roof is laid with colourful Zsolnay tiles from Pécs, the ceramic works whose glaze turns up again and again on the buildings of this era.
Inside, the ground floor is the working market of paprika, sausage, pastries and spirits, the basement holds fishmongers and pickle stalls, and the upper gallery has food counters and souvenirs. The hall was badly damaged in the Second World War and reopened in 1997 after a long restoration.
2. Hungarian National Museum
A short walk up the boulevard brings you to the columned front of the Hungarian National Museum. The collection began in 1802 with a gift from Count Ferenc Széchényi, and Mihály Pollack's neoclassical building went up between 1837 and 1847.
It was barely finished when history arrived on its steps. During the revolution of 1848, Sándor Petőfi's poem Nemzeti dal (National Song) and the radicals' twelve demands are remembered as being read out here to the crowd, and the steps have been a place of national gatherings ever since.
3. Dohány Street Synagogue
A few streets on stands the Dohány Street Synagogue, built between 1854 and 1859 to a design by Ludwig Förster, with interiors by Frigyes Feszl. Its Moorish Revival decoration draws on the Islamic architecture of North Africa and medieval Spain, and with 2,964 seats it is the largest synagogue in Europe.
The complex is also a place of memory. In the rear courtyard, the Raoul Wallenberg Holocaust Memorial Park holds Imre Varga's metal weeping willow, whose leaves carry the names of victims. Next door, the Hungarian Jewish Museum stands on the plot where Theodor Herzl's family house once stood.
4. Liszt Academy of Music
Head north through the old Jewish quarter to Liszt Ferenc tér and the Franz Liszt Academy of Music. Liszt himself founded the academy in 1875; its present home, by Flóris Korb and Kálmán Giergl, was put up in 1907 and is one of the best-known Art Nouveau buildings in the city. Alajos Stróbl's statue of Liszt dominates the façade.
Inside are frescoes, statues of composers and more Zsolnay ceramics, and in the upstairs foyer the fresco called the Fountain of Art, counted among the most significant works of Hungarian Art Nouveau.
5. Hungarian State Opera House
Turn onto Andrássy Avenue and you meet Liszt again, this time beside Ferenc Erkel in front of the Hungarian State Opera House; the figures flanking the main entrance are by Stróbl, the same sculptor as at the academy. Miklós Ybl designed the house in neo-Renaissance style with Baroque touches, and it opened on 27 September 1884, paid for by the city and by Emperor Franz Joseph.
Gustav Mahler directed the company here from 1888 to 1891. A century after the first opening night, a restoration was completed in time to reopen the house on the same date in 1984.
6. St. Stephen's Basilica
The last few blocks lead to St. Stephen's Basilica, which took more than half a century to build. József Hild began it in 1851; after the dome collapsed during construction, Miklós Ybl took over and reshaped the church in neo-Renaissance style, and József Kauser completed it in 1905.
At 96 metres it is exactly as tall as the Parliament across the district, a match meant to show that worldly and spiritual life carried equal weight. Inside, a reliquary holds the Holy Right, the mummified right hand of St. Stephen, Hungary's first king.
Check the days before you set out: the synagogue is closed on Saturdays and Jewish holidays, the National Museum on Mondays, and the Liszt Academy and the Opera House can only be seen inside on guided tours.
From the dome, the walk reads as one story. Zsolnay tiles on the market roof and in the academy, Ybl at both the Opera and the Basilica, Stróbl's Liszt on two buildings: the same names and the same ambition run through this side of the river, all raised while Pest was turning itself into a capital. Across the Danube, the castle and the bastions are waiting for another day.