House of Terror

The building at 60 Andrássy Avenue has been a place of terror under two different regimes, and now it is a museum about both. From 1937, this elegant apartment building became the headquarters of the Arrow Cross Party, Hungary's fascist movement. When they seized power in 1944, it was renamed the House of Loyalty and used as a prison and torture facility. After the war, the Communist secret police — the ÁVH, Hungary's equivalent of the KGB — took over the very same building and continued using it for exactly the same purposes.

The museum opened on February 24, 2002, and the exterior announces its presence with an enormous blade-like awning on the roof that casts the word TERROR in shadow on the facade. Inside, the permanent exhibition moves chronologically through Hungary's double occupation: first by the Arrow Cross with Nazi backing, then by the Communist Party with Soviet backing. From 1944 to 1990, this building was the administrative heart of state violence.

The most affecting section is the basement. Visitors descend in a slow-moving elevator while a former janitor narrates, on video, how executions were carried out in the building. The basement cells, where the ÁVH tortured political prisoners, have been preserved with their original fittings. The rooms are small, the ceilings low, and the reality of what happened in them is inescapable.

The museum is deliberately confrontational and not without controversy — critics note it devotes far more space to communist-era crimes than to the Arrow Cross period. But as a physical experience, walking through the actual rooms where these things happened, the House of Terror is one of the most powerful museum visits in Europe.