Terror Háza is one of the most affecting museums in Central Europe. The building itself is the exhibit as much as anything inside it: a grand neoclassical townhouse on Budapest's most elegant boulevard that served as a torture and detention site through two successive totalitarian regimes. A black steel frame spelling out TERROR projects a shadow across the facade.
The permanent exhibition moves chronologically through fascist occupation and communist dictatorship, using original objects, film footage, and reconstructed cells. The basement, where interrogations and executions took place, is handled with particular restraint — which makes it more unsettling than any dramatic staging could. Allow at least two hours. The museum does not shy from political interpretation, which has made it controversial, but the core documentation of what happened here is incontrovertible.