Dohány Street Synagogue

The Dohány Street Synagogue is the largest synagogue in Europe and the spiritual centre of Budapest's Jewish community. Designed by the Viennese architect Ludwig Förster, with an interior by Frigyes Feszl, it was built between 1854 and 1859 and seats almost 3,000 people. Its striped brick facade and twin onion-domed towers reflect the Moorish Revival style that was fashionable at the time, and it remains a working synagogue of the Neolog tradition.

The interior is unusual for a synagogue: it has an organ, and the original instrument was played by Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saëns. The building was damaged during the Second World War, when the area became part of the Budapest ghetto, and it was carefully restored in the 1990s.

A visit covers more than the main hall. The Hungarian Jewish Museum and Archives, built in 1930 on the site of the house where Theodor Herzl was born, holds religious objects and records of community life. In the courtyard is a cemetery for around 2,000 people who died in the ghetto in the winter of 1944 to 1945. Behind the synagogue, the Raoul Wallenberg Memorial Park contains Imre Varga's Holocaust memorial, a metal weeping willow whose leaves bear the names of victims, and the Heroes' Temple commemorates Jewish soldiers who died in the First World War.

Tickets can be bought online through the official visitor website, which helps you skip the ticket queue, and guided tours are available in several languages. The synagogue closes on Saturdays and on Jewish holidays, and opening times change through the year, so check before you go. Men are asked to cover their heads, and modest dress is expected. Bags are checked at the entrance. Allow around an hour and a half to see the synagogue, the museum and the memorial garden without rushing.

The synagogue stands on the edge of the old Jewish Quarter in District VII, where you can continue to the Rumbach Street and Kazinczy Street synagogues, the ruin bars and the cafés of Kazinczy utca. Astoria station on metro line M2 is a two-minute walk away, and the Hungarian National Museum is about ten minutes south.