Explore #236: Adria Palace, Budapest, Hungary – September 2018

Explore #5 of the ‘Lightweights & Heavyweights’ Tour
The final explore of our long weekend in and around Budapest was a gorgeous neo-baroque ‘palace’…

History (abridged and rewritten from here and here)

Built between 1900 and 1902, the Adria Palace was designed by Artúr Meinig as the headquarters of the Adria Royal Hungarian Sea Navigation Company. It has a twin building in the Croatian port of Rijeka which still retains it original function, being the headquarters of the Jadrolinija shipping company. However, the building in Budapest was only used as a shipping headquarters for less than two decades, as the Adria Shipping Company went bust shortly after Hungary lost access to the sea in wake of the First World War.

Since then the Adria Palace has been home to a weird and wonderful range of different enterprises. The ground floor hosted the Ypsilon, which pompously declared itself the city’s only true Parisian coffee house. It also hosted an office of the Hungarian Commerce Bank of Pest, which in January 1935 was the target of a robbery which claimed the lives of the clerk and an errand boy. The culprits were finally caught after a two day manhunt.

After World War II one of the main tenants of the building was the Hungarian Association of Partisans – legend has it that its president stored his extensive liquor collection in a bulky metal safe. The Partisans were soon joined by the Express travel agency, which spent more than 40 years in the building, before going out of business in 1990. Yet another part was leased out to the Heim Pál Children’s Hospital and became a dental surgery.

Today the palace is mostly empty, save for the occasional use by film crews – A Good Day to Die Hard, Red Sparrow, and Blade Runner 2049 have all shot in the building in recent years. In March 2019 its current owners the BDPST Group announced plans to restore the building (which is a protected monument), alongside development of apartments, offices, and storage facilities.

Our Explore

We knew very little about this fascinating time capsule before we arrived. Parts of the site are still used as apartments, but we sneaked up some stairs, tried an outside door, and were pleasantly surprised when it opened! We then spent a very pleasant couple of hours quietly exploring the secrets of the palace…

…my first glimpse of the stunning ornate bay window…

…and here are a few photos which I’ve uncovered from the period when Express Travel Agency used the room for meetings, and christmas parties (for the employees’ children I presume?)…

…and a screengrab from a scene in Blade Runner 2049….

This curved internal balcony/walkway runs around the back of the bay windowed part of the room…

The top of the grand marble staircase, replete with neo-baroque styled ceiling…

The entrance hall and front door…

We then moved on to another part of the building, which houses apartments which are still occupied. The spiral stairwell and central lift shaft were no less impressive…

…and I will leave you with a few more shots of that gorgeous internal courtyard.

Thanks for sailing through.

Adam X