Story
The story of Buda Castle
On the southern tip of Castle Hill stands the palace of the Hungarian kings. King Béla IV built the first royal residence on the hill between 1247 and 1265, and later kings kept enlarging it.
Sigismund, who was also Holy Roman Emperor, made Buda his main seat, and during his reign it became probably the largest Gothic palace of the late Middle Ages, with a Roman Hall 70 metres long under a carved wooden ceiling. Under King Matthias Corvinus, after his marriage to Beatrice of Naples in 1476, Italian artists and humanists arrived, and Buda became a centre of the Renaissance.
The Baroque palace that fills most of the site today was built between 1749 and 1769. It was badly damaged in the siege of Budapest in the Second World War and rebuilt in a simplified Baroque style under communism. Today it houses the Hungarian National Gallery, the Budapest History Museum and the National Széchényi Library, and it is part of the World Heritage Site declared in 1987.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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