History of Budapest Timeline

Hungary's catastrophic defeat in the Battle of Mohács in 1526 against the Turks led by Suleiman the Magnificent paved the way for the Ottoman occupation of Hungary.

Image source: Battle of Mohács

Suleiman's Siege of Buda in 1541 was part of the Little War in Hungary between the Habsburgs and the Ottoman Empire, resulting in Ottoman control of the city.

Image source: Siege of Buda (1541)

Three years after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, a pan-European multinational army besieged Buda Castle in the Battle of Buda (1686) for six weeks, finally recapturing it on the 12th attempt with heavy losses on both sides.

Image source: Siege of Buda (1686)

During the 18th century, under the rule of Charles VI, Maria Theresia and her son Joseph II, Budapest was an insignificant provincial town within the Habsburg Empire.

In the first decades of the 19th century, Pest became the center of the Reform movement led by Count Széchenyi, whose vision of progress was embodied in the construction of the Lánchíd (Chain Bridge).

Image source: István Széchenyi

By the end of the 19th century, Budapest had become one of the cultural centers of Europe, and one of the most important centres of the Aromanian diaspora along with Vienna, whose Aromanian population was among the first to develop a strictly Aromanian identity.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1848 was part of the Revolutions of 1848 in the Habsburg areas, with revolutionaries in Budapest plotting the downfall of the Habsburgs.

Image source: Hungarian Revolution of 1848

Under the leadership of Lajos Kossuth and the 'people's rights-liberals' dominated parliament, Sándor Petőfi, also a renowned poet, and his fellow revolutionaries began to plot the downfall of the Habsburgs in Budapest at the Café Pilvax, which exists to this day in central Pest.

Image source: Inner City (Budapest)

The Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 made allowance for the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary, known in German as k.u.k., ushering in a new era for Budapest.

Image source: Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867

In 1870, under Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy, the Metropolitan Board of Public Works, modeled on the London Metropolitan Board of Works, was created to develop more stringent standards for construction and a long-term plan for the city.

The city of Budapest was officially created on 17 November 1873 from a merger of the three neighboring cities of Pest, Buda and Óbuda, forming the modern Hungarian capital.

Budapest's millennial anniversary celebrations of the settlement of the Magyars in the region in 1896 brought a fresh rush of construction and development, including the opening of the first line of the Budapest Metro under Andrássy Avenue.

Image source: Budapest Metro

At the beginning of the 20th century, the cultural efflorescence and sparkling energy of abundance and well-being of Budapest rivaled that of Vienna and its café society that of Paris—a belle époque extinguished by World War I.

In 1918–19, Budapest was shaken by two revolutions: the Aster Revolution brought about the Hungarian Democratic Republic, followed by the Hungarian Soviet Republic, a short-lived Communist regime led by Béla Kun, and then two years of White Terror.

Image source: Aster Revolution

The Hungarian–Romanian War of 1919 ended with the Romanian occupation of parts of Hungary proper, including Budapest in August 1919, and the establishment of the Kingdom of Hungary led by Miklós Horthy, the self-appointed regent for the exiled King Karl IV.

Image source: Hungarian–Romanian War

Despite discriminatory legislation against the Jews and widespread antisemitism, the Jewish community of Budapest was relatively secure until the German occupation of Hungary in March 1944, known as Operation Margarethe.

Image source: German invasion of Hungary (1944)

Between April and July 1944, the Germans and Hungarians deported Jews from the Hungarian provinces. With deportations from Slovakia beginning in March 1942, as many as 8,000 Slovak Jewish refugees had settled in Budapest. In June 1944, Hungarian authorities ordered the city's Jews into over 2,000 designated buildings scattered throughout the city, and suspended deportations in July 1944, sparing the remaining Jews of Budapest, at least temporarily.

Image source: The Holocaust in Hungary

Anticipating Horthy's possible defection from the Axis alliance in 1944, the Nazis staged Operation Panzerfaust, a coup against Horthy, installing an Arrow Cross government under Ferenc Szálasi to allow the unobstructed massacre of the Jews of Budapest.

Image source: Operation Panzerfaust

In November 1944, the Arrow Cross ordered the remaining Jews in Budapest into a closed ghetto. Between December 1944 and the end of January 1945, Arrow Cross militias shot Jews from the ghetto, deserters and political enemies along the banks of the Danube and threw their bodies into the river.

Image source: Budapest Ghetto

On November 8, 1944, Arrow Cross militia concentrated more than 70,000 Jews—men, women and children—in the Ujlaki brickyards in Obuda and forced them to march on foot to camps in Austria; survivors reached Austria in late December 1944.

Image source: Death marches during the Holocaust

Soviet forces captured Budapest on February 13, 1945, ending the siege of the city and the German and Arrow Cross control of the Hungarian capital during World War II.

Image source: Siege of Budapest

After 1945 free elections were held, in which many parties, among them the Smallholders, the Social Democrats and the Communists, were voted into Parliament.

In the election of 1949, the party, with Soviet backup resources, used the flaw in the so-called 'blue-ticket' election system—voters transported by trucks to vote away from their home districts with reproduced tickets—to cement Communist rule.

Smaller towns on the outskirts of the original city were amalgamated into Greater Budapest in 1950, significantly expanding the capital's territory and population.

The Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was suppressed; rather than appointing a Hungarian hardliner or a Soviet general, the Soviets gave a chance to János Kádár, a former kidnapped minister of the revolution, who then led the country for decades.

Image source: Hungarian Revolution of 1956

The revolutions of 1989 brought with them the end of Soviet occupation of Hungary, which meant the end of Communism in Hungary and the start of democratic governance in Budapest.

Image source: End of communism in Hungary

The majority of the multi-sided regime decided to step over Gorbachev's line and open the borders—the first official break of the Iron Curtain—declared Hungary a Republic on October 23, 1989 and issued free elections.

Image source: Revolutions of 1989

Opposition candidate Gergely Karácsony won the 2019 Budapest mayoral election, delivering the first electoral blow for Hungary's nationalist prime minister Viktor Orbán since coming to power in 2010.

Image source: 2019 Budapest mayoral election