Andrássy Avenue

Where it sits. Andrássy út runs for two and a half kilometres in a dead-straight line across Pest, from Erzsébet tér at the edge of the inner city to Heroes' Square and the gates of the Városliget park. It is Budapest's grand axis and its most legible piece of urbanism: four distinct stretches, each wider and greener than the last. From Erzsébet tér to the Oktogon it is a commercial street of tall Neo-Renaissance blocks; from the Oktogon to Kodály körönd it opens into a tree-lined allée; beyond that the palaces stand back behind small front gardens; and in the final stretch to the park there are detached villas, most of them embassies. It has been on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2002 as part of the Budapest inscription.

The story behind it. The avenue was decreed in 1870 to relieve the parallel Király utca, begun in 1872 and inaugurated on 20 August 1876, the national holiday. The winning plan blended three competition entries, and the palaces along it — built mostly by 1884 under the leadership of Miklós Ybl and financed by Hungarian and foreign banks — were occupied by aristocrats, bankers and landowners. It was named in 1885 after Gyula Andrássy, the prime minister who pushed the project through. Because the city refused to allow surface transport along it, an underground railway was proposed in 1870, built between 1894 and 1896 and opened in time for the millennium celebrations in the park: the M1, the first underground railway on the European continent, still running its small yellow trains through shallow tiled stations a few metres below the pavement. The street's twentieth-century name changes read like a political timeline — Stalin Avenue in 1950, Avenue of Hungarian Youth during the 1956 uprising, People's Republic Road in 1957, and Andrássy again in 1990.

On screen. Budapest's career as a stand-in city rests on streets like this one: Wilhelmine-era frontages, wide pavements, no visible modern retail architecture, and a film industry that can close a boulevard for a morning. Alan Parker brought Evita here in 1996 after five weeks in Buenos Aires, using 23 Budapest locations to play the Argentine capital; the production spent two days re-enacting Eva Perón's state funeral with 4,000 extras and filmed the exteriors of the funeral outside St Stephen's Basilica, a few minutes from the foot of Andrássy, after being refused access to the interior. Spy (2015) shot in Budapest from March 2014 precisely because the city could pass for Paris and elsewhere; Blade Runner 2049 used the Stock Exchange palace on nearby Szabadság tér for its Las Vegas casino; Red Heat (1988) turned Buda Castle into a Soviet ministry. Travellers who arrive expecting to recognise specific Andrássy frontages from a specific film usually leave having recognised the atmosphere instead — the boulevard is a workhorse double rather than a signature location.

What you actually see today. The Hungarian State Opera House, Ybl's masterpiece of 1875–1884, sits on the left-hand side walking outward and reopened in 2022 after a long restoration; opposite is the Drechsler House. At Nagymező utca, four theatres cluster at one junction — the stretch Budapest calls its Broadway. Liszt Ferenc tér, off to the right, holds the Academy of Music and a run of cafés. At number 60 stands the House of Terror, the building used first by the Arrow Cross and then by the communist state security service, and a museum since 2002; the black frame around its roofline throws a shadow of the word terror onto the facade in low sun. Further out are the Liszt and Kodály memorial houses and the Hopp Ferenc Museum of Asian Art, and at the end, Heroes' Square opens with the Millennium Monument between the Museum of Fine Arts and the Műcsarnok exhibition hall.

Getting there and timing. The M1 shadows the whole avenue with stops every few hundred metres, which makes it easy to walk one section and ride the rest; the trains are small, frequent and part of the sightseeing. Walking the full length takes about forty minutes at a steady pace, with wide, level pavements and dropped kerbs throughout. Late afternoon light runs straight down the axis towards the park, which is when the palace facades look best. The inner end has become a luxury retail strip, and prices in the cafés on Liszt Ferenc tér reflect the address; the side streets north of the Oktogon are cheaper and livelier. In December the avenue is strung with lights and the Christmas markets on Vörösmarty tér and at St Stephen's are a short walk from its start.