The story of this place
The elegant building at Andrássy út 60 has a monstrous history: it served as headquarters first of the fascist Arrow Cross Party in 1944, and then of the communist secret police, the ÁVH, from 1945 into the 1950s. In its cellars, prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed. Opened in 2002, the House of Terror museum documents the two totalitarian regimes that ravaged 20th-century Hungary, with reconstructed cells, a wall of victims' portraits, and a black basalt facade whose overhanging cornice throws the word TERROR in shadow across the building at certain hours. It is at once a museum and a memorial to those killed, tortured, or imprisoned within its own walls.