Buda Castle
— the long pale palace the river keeps watch over.
Not only on a wall.
“A long pale palace on Castle Hill, set above the Buda bank of the Danube and looking across to the Pest skyline. The site has held a royal residence since the thirteenth century; the current Baroque shape was finished in 1769 and rebuilt after the Second World War. The funicular still climbs from Clark Ádám square, the way it has since 1870.
Buda Castle, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Buda Castle (Hungarian: Budavári Palota) crowns the southern end of Castle Hill in Budapest's first district, rising about 170 metres above the Buda bank of the Danube. The first royal residence on the site was completed by King Béla IV in 1265; the present Baroque palace was built between 1749 and 1769 under Maria Theresa, sacked in 1849 and again in 1945, and reconstructed across the 1950s and 1960s. The hill, the castle and the Danube banks have been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.
The postwar reconstruction by Hungarian architects István Janáki, Lajos Hidasi and others kept the long Baroque silhouette and the central dome but reorganised the interiors for state and museum use. The pale limestone façades are quarried from Sóskút, southwest of the city, the same stone used in much of nineteenth-century Pest. Below the palace, the medieval cellars and a network of caves cut into the dolomite hill have been mapped to about ten kilometres in length and partly opened to visitors as the Buda Castle Labyrinth.
The palace today houses the Hungarian National Gallery in its central wings, the Budapest History Museum in the south wing and the Széchényi National Library in the F wing. Castle Hill itself is pedestrianised; access is by foot from the Chain Bridge, by the Castle Bus (Várbusz), or by the Budavári Sikló funicular, which has run from Clark Ádám tér since 1870 and was rebuilt in 1986 after wartime destruction. Cars enter only by permit, and the cobbled streets carry only residents' traffic.