Budapest History Museum: The Castle Museum and the Medieval Palace Beneath It

In 1974 a sealed cellar on Buda’s Castle Hill gave back the lost statues of a medieval king. King Sigismund’s Gothic figures stand today in the Budapest History Museum’s Castle Museum, one floor above an older find: the medieval royal palace itself, dug out from under the Baroque one everyone photographs from the Danube.

Start underground in the Gothic Hall, the palace chapel and the royal cellar, then come up to Sigismund’s statues on the ground floor and climb to Budapest, Light and Shadow, a thousand years of the city from Aquincum to the fall of communism. Allow two to three hours and pair it with the rest of the hill: Matthias Church and Fisherman’s Bastion are at the northern end, and the Hungarian National Gallery shares the palace. The museum opens every day, Mondays included, which makes it Castle Hill’s Monday museum. One thing to plan around: a wheelchair gets you everywhere except the medieval palace rooms.

The essentials: Building E of the Buda Castle palace, Szent György tér 2, open daily 10:00 to 18:00 with last entry at 17:30, and an adult ticket is 3,800 HUF (about $12).

The restored chapel of the medieval royal palace, on the basement level of the Castle Museum. Photo: C1815, public domain, resized, via Wikimedia Commons

📋 At a Glance

📍 Where	Building E, Buda Castle palace, Szent György tér 2. Main entrance from the Lion Courtyard
🕙 Hours	Monday to Sunday 10:00-18:00, last entry 17:30
🎟️ Adult ticket	3,800 HUF (about $12), every exhibition included
🏰 The highlight	The medieval royal palace in the basement, and the Gothic statues found in 1974
⏱️ Time needed	2-3 hours
💳 Budapest Card	One free entry
🚌 Getting up	Bus 16A or 116 to Dísz tér, or bus 16 to Palota út, gyorslift and the lifts
⚠️ Closed	1 November, 24-26 December

The palace under the palace

The Habsburg palace you see from Pest was built on top of a medieval royal residence that wars, sieges and rebuilding had buried. After the destruction of 1945, archaeologists began excavating it in the 1950s and found rooms nobody had seen for centuries. The Castle Museum’s basement exhibition, Buda, “the seat and throne of royalty”, walks you through what they restored.

You get the Gothic Hall, the palace chapel, the Treasurer’s House, stretches of castle wall and the gardens that went with them. Around them sit the finds: royal coats of arms, Renaissance stone carving, reconstructed tiled stoves, and tableware from the reign of King Matthias. A room on the Corvina library, the king’s famous book collection, plays the court’s music. Down in the royal cellar, the subject is how the court kept itself clean, which is a more entertaining topic than it sounds, and a stone-carving workshop and a guards’ rest room fill in the working side of palace life. A 3D animation rebuilds the palace as it stood in the early sixteenth century.

The basement is the one level a wheelchair cannot manage (see accessibility below).

The statues from the 1974 cellar

In 1974, a sealed cellar of one of the townhouses in front of the royal palace gave up more than sixty sculptural torsos and thousands of fragments. They came from the court of King Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387-1437), who built a palace to rival any royal residence in Europe, and some still carry their paint. Many were never finished: the sculpture workshop broke up, in circumstances that are still unclear, before the work was done.

They have their own room on the ground floor, Gothic Sculptures from the Royal Palace of Buda, and it is the strangest room in the building: saints and secular figures by first-rate masters from across Europe, most of them torsos, looking a lot more alive than broken stone has any right to.

A carved stone head from the early fifteenth-century palace of King Sigismund, found on Castle Hill and now in the Castle Museum. Photo: Bjoertvedt, CC BY-SA 4.0, resized, via Wikimedia Commons

The rest of the building, floor by floor

Level	Exhibition	What it covers
Basement	Buda, “the seat and throne of royalty”	The medieval royal palace, its rooms, chapel, cellar and finds
Ground floor	Gothic Sculptures from the Royal Palace of Buda	The statues found in 1974
1st floor	Budapest, Light and Shadow	1,000 years of the city, from Aquincum to the fall of communism
Ground and 1st floor	The Royal Palace, the Castle of Culture	The palace from 1686 to today
2nd floor	In Pursuit of Lost Times	Budapest before Budapest: stone tools 50,000 years old to the Hungarian conquest

Budapest, Light and Shadow is the “1,000 years” exhibition, and its idea is that this city has been destroyed and rebuilt again and again. The main route winds like the Danube, with side rooms on the things that made Budapest Budapest: the mix of peoples, the bathing culture, the vineyards that are gone, trade and industry.

The Royal Palace, the Castle of Culture follows the building above your head: the Baroque palace of Maria Theresa, the place where the Holy Crown was kept from the end of the eighteenth century until 1944, the huge Ybl and Hauszmann expansion, the siege of 1945 and the long conversion into the museums and library it holds now.

What is on now

• A City on the Front Line: Buda and Pest under Ottoman Rule, 1526-1686. Opened on 15 October 2026, for the 500th anniversary of the battle of Mohács and the first Ottoman capture of Buda. Most of what is on show is archaeological material the museum has hardly ever exhibited.
• Chronicles of Lost Buildings. Medieval churches, monasteries and the early synagogue of Buda, told through stone carving and wall-painting fragments. A temporary section runs until 25 October 2026, and the permanent display stays.
• 1 Month, 1 Artifact. One object from the collection, changed monthly. Right now it is a Chinese coin minted in 1902 and dug up on the slope of Castle Hill.

All of these are included in the normal ticket.

Source: BTM Castle Museum, A City on the Front Line, Chronicles of Lost Buildings and 1 Month, 1 Artifact, checked 17 October 2026.

Tickets and opening hours

Ticket	Price
Adult	3,800 HUF (about $12)
Student or youth, 6-26, EEA citizens	1,900 HUF (about $6)
Senior, 62-70, EEA citizens	1,900 HUF (about $6)
Under 6 and over 70, EEA citizens	Free
BTM+ (one entry each to the four BTM museums within a month)	5,500 HUF (about $17)
St Stephen’s Hall + Castle Museum, tablet guide	5,900 HUF (about $18)
St Stephen’s Hall + Castle Museum, guided by a person	6,500 HUF (about $20)

Prices are in HUF, which is what you pay at the counter. Converted at 1 USD = 323 HUF, the ECB rate on 16 October 2026. Rates move, so treat the converted figures as indicative.

The desk takes cash, bank cards and SZÉP cards; online tickets on the museum’s jegy.hu shop take bank cards only. Once you are inside, tickets cannot be refunded.

Opening hours: Monday to Sunday 10:00 to 18:00. The ticket desk closes and last entry is at 17:30, and the rooms start closing at 17:45, from the second floor down. Special dates on the museum’s list: open on 23 October, closed on 1 November, closed from 24 to 26 December, open from 27 to 30 December with shorter hours on 31 December, and open 12:00 to 18:00 on 1 January 2027.

Free entry: for everyone on the national holidays, 15 March, 20 August and 23 October. On the last Saturday of every month, under-26s and up to two close relatives accompanying under-18s get in free (EEA citizens). Visitors with a disability and one companion each go free. Families with two or more children under 18 get 50% off for one or two adults (EEA citizens).

Budapest Card: one free entry. If you hold a card, this is one of the easier museums to cash it in, because it opens on Mondays.

St Stephen’s Hall, the reconstructed state room in the same building, is visited only with a time slot booked at szentistvanterem.hu, and its combined tickets cover the museum as well. The hall and the museum share an entrance and a ticket desk.

Source: BTM Castle Museum, ticket information and English ticket page, visiting information and special opening days, prices and hours checked 17 October 2026.

How long, and in which order

Two to three hours covers it at a sensible pace. The building is bigger than it looks from the courtyard, four levels plus the outdoor parts of the medieval palace, so if you read everything, plan on half a day.

The order matters less than the clock. The rooms close from the top floor down from 17:45, so on a late visit do the second floor first and finish in the basement. On a morning visit, start underground while you are fresh, because the medieval palace is where the time goes.

The route between levels can double back on itself, and it is easy to end up retracing a corridor. The museum’s floor map is online: open it on your phone before you start.

Getting there

There are two ways in. The main entrance is in the Lion Courtyard, on the top of the hill. The King’s Cellar entrance opens on the river side, from the Gyilokjáró courtyard below the eastern castle wall, and both have ticket desks.

• Bus 16A or 116 to Dísz tér, then walk on to the Lion Courtyard. Bus 16A runs from Széll Kálmán tér, bus 116 from Fény utcai piac.
• Bus 16 to Palota út, gyorslift, then ride the lifts up to the Lion Courtyard. Bus 16 runs between Deák Ferenc tér and Széll Kálmán tér. A standard BKK ticket is 500 HUF (about $1.50), bought before boarding in the BudapestGO app or from a ticket machine.
• From the river, through Várkert Bazár. The long open-air escalator and the lift on the right side of the Várkert Bazár bring you up to the King’s Cellar entrance, or you can take the stairs. The garden around them is open daily 6:00 to 24:00. Our Várkert Bazár guide covers the route.
• The Buda Castle Funicular from Clark Ádám tér, 4,500 HUF (about $14) one way, 5,500 HUF (about $17) return, 08:00 to 22:00. It stops on Mondays of odd weeks for maintenance. The upper station is on Szent György tér, the square in the museum’s address.

Source: access routes from the BTM Castle Museum; bus routes from BKK’s timetable and fares from bkk.hu; funicular fares and hours from BKV; garden hours from varkertbazar.hu; all checked 17 October 2026.

Accessibility

The main entrance in the Lion Courtyard is step-free, and a lift serves the first and second floors, so every exhibition there is accessible. A lift also goes down to the medieval palace, but the palace rooms themselves cannot be done in a wheelchair: it is a medieval building with medieval floors. The museum asks visitors with a disability to get in touch before they come, at info@btm.hu.

Source: BTM Castle Museum, accessibility, checked 17 October 2026.

Castle Museum or National Gallery?

They sit in the same palace, a short walk apart, but they are separate museums with separate tickets.

	Castle Museum (BTM)	Hungarian National Gallery
Address	Szent György tér 2, Building E	Szent György tér 2
Subject	Budapest: medieval palace, archaeology, city history	Hungarian art, plus an international collection
Adult ticket	3,800 HUF (about $12)	5,800 HUF (about $18)
Open	Every day, 10:00-18:00	Tuesday to Sunday, 10:00-18:00
Monday	Open	Closed

If you can only do one: the Castle Museum if you want to know what the hill was before it was a postcard, the Gallery if you want paintings. On a Monday the choice is made for you.

Source: National Gallery ticket price and hours from mng.hu, checked 17 October 2026.

The museum’s outpost on Táncsics Mihály utca

The museum also runs the Medieval Jewish House of Prayer at Táncsics Mihály utca 26, in the north of the Castle District, a vaulted room where Hebrew inscriptions came to light in 1964. It tells the story of Buda’s medieval and Ottoman-era Jewish community and still serves as a place of worship. It is a separate ticket, 800 HUF, open Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday 10:00 to 18:00 and Friday 10:00 to 17:00, closed Monday and Saturday.

Source: BTM Castle Museum, Medieval Jewish House of Prayer, checked 17 October 2026.

Around it on Castle Hill

• Fisherman’s Bastion is at the northern end of the same hill, and its terraces are free at any hour.
• Matthias Church stands beside the Bastion; the Castle Museum even shows some of its thirteenth and fourteenth-century carvings.
• The Labyrinth of Buda Castle takes you into the caves under the same hill.
• Hospital in the Rock is the twentieth-century counterpart, a wartime hospital and nuclear bunker inside the rock.
• If you are weighing a Budapest Card, our Budapest Card guide does the arithmetic, and Budapest museums ranked by time cost helps you pick the rest of the week.