Museums near the centre of Budapest

Late Gothic winged altarpieces: whole altar cabinets lifted out of parish churches in Upper Hungary and set in one hall. Picnic in May by Pál Szinyei Merse, painted in 1873 and refused by his contemporaries. The room of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka, with The Lonely Cedar and Pilgrimage to the Cedars in Lebanon. Yawning Apprentice by Mihály Munkácsy. Turn-of-the-century sculpture and Hungarian modernism: József Rippl-Rónai, Károly Ferenczy, Lajos Gulácsy.

Gothic statues from the royal palace: more than sixty torsos that can be reassembled and thousands of fragments, found in 1974 in the filled-in cellar of a burgher house in front of the palace. They were carved for the court of Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387–1437) by masters who had come from several parts of Europe; some went into the ground half finished. The Gothic Hall keeps its seat niches. The palace chapel and the cellars beneath it.

The grave of Semmelweis in the courtyard of the house where he was born. Medical instruments from antiquity to the twentieth century, gathered across Europe. The Golden Eagle pharmacy in Tárnok utca: the fittings of an old town pharmacy, cabinets, vessels and laboratory. Anatomical wax models of the eighteenth century.

Ritual silver and textiles from Hungarian congregations, the earliest from the seventeenth century. A Jewish tombstone of the Roman period from Pannonia, the oldest trace of Jewish presence on this ground. The Holocaust room, with documents from the Budapest ghetto. The collection of the Chevra Kadisha burial society.

The Roman lapidarium in the basement: inscribed stones and sarcophagi from Pannonia. On the Border of East and West, grave goods from the Palaeolithic to the conquest, with gold from Avar burials. The History of Hungary in two parts, from the crown of Saint Stephen to 1990. The coronation mantle of 1031 and the Seuso Treasure have been closed for building work since December 2025; until that work ends there is no point in coming for them.

The permanent display in 3,200 pull-out frames: nearly half a million stamps, laid out by country and by year. A frame is drawn from its cabinet by hand and pushed back again — looking here is done standing, one frame at a time. Hungarian issues from the first Austro-Hungarian stamps to the present, with proofs and misprints.

Liszt’s instruments, the pianos he played and taught on in these rooms. The desk and furniture of the flat, left where they stood. The library and scores carrying his markings. The chamber hall of the old Academy one floor below, where morning concerts are given on Saturdays at 11:00 from September.

Hungarian and European Art Nouveau: furniture, glass, ceramics and textiles of the turn of the twentieth century from the holdings of the Museum of Applied Arts. The villa itself, with its late nineteenth-century interiors.

The Baumhorn synagogue of 1923, its hall restored and standing inside the new building. The permanent exhibition: the road from the loss of civil rights to the deportations of 1944, told through documents, objects and the fortunes of particular families. The wall of names in the courtyard.

The Esterházy Madonna by Raphael, one panel out of the 637 paintings the state bought in 1870–1871. The Spanish rooms: El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo, Goya. 263 Dutch and Flemish pictures arrived in the same purchase. The Egyptian department holds coffins, stelae and burial goods. Among the old sculpture stands a bronze Horse and Rider that the museum connects with Leonardo da Vinci.