Hungarian Parliament

The building took from 1885 to 1904 to complete. It stretches about 268 metres along the Danube, has 691 rooms, and its dome rises to 96 metres. That number is no accident: 896 is the traditional year of the Magyar conquest, celebrated across Hungary at the 1896 millennium.

Its neo-Gothic riverfront is often compared to London's Houses of Parliament, but inside, the plan is symmetrical: two identical chambers face each other across the central dome, one for each house of the old two-chamber parliament.

When Hungary held a design competition in 1882, the judges famously could not settle on a single entry. Imre Steindl's neo-Gothic plan won and became the Parliament, but the runners-up were not wasted.

Look across Kossuth tér. The story goes that the two big palaces facing the Parliament grew out of the other prize-winning designs: the former Palace of Justice, for decades the Museum of Ethnography, and the Ministry of Agriculture.

Inside, about 40 kilograms of 22–23 carat gold was beaten into leaf for the ceilings, stairways and halls. The ceremonial Grand Stairway has 96 steps, echoing the height of the dome.

The building is not just shown off from outside. Guided tours climb that staircase to the Dome Hall, and the old Upper House chamber can be visited when parliament is not sitting.

Imre Steindl worked on the building for almost twenty years. It is widely told that his eyesight failed towards the end, and he died in 1902, only weeks before the building was inaugurated. He never saw his parliament in use, and the last details were finished in 1904.

Smoking was never allowed in the chambers, so the corridor outside the old Upper House is lined with numbered brass cigar holders. Members left their cigars there before going in to vote. Parliamentary tradition says that if your cigar burned out while you listened, the speech had been 'worth a Havana'.

Since 2000 the Holy Crown of Hungary has been kept under the dome, watched day and night by a ceremonial guard. Its journey there was long. At the end of the Second World War, Hungarian guards handed the coronation regalia to the US Army, and they spent the Cold War at Fort Knox. President Carter's administration returned them on 6 January 1978. They were shown in the National Museum until the crown, sceptre, orb and sword moved here.

Politics left its marks on the building too. In 1950 a red star of about one and a half tonnes was mounted on the spire, after the plan to unveil it on Stalin's 70th birthday was delayed. It stayed until 1990 and is now kept inside the building.

The square in front has seen the country's turning points. In October 1956 huge crowds gathered here during the revolution, and on 25 October security forces fired into the crowd, a day remembered as Bloody Thursday. A memorial below the square remembers the victims.

If part of the façade is wrapped in scaffolding when you visit, that is normal. The original ornaments were carved from a soft limestone that weathered quickly, and since 1988 restorers have been replacing them piece by piece with harder stone from Süttő. With so much carved detail, some part of the building is always being renewed.