Best of Budapest & Hungary

On the occasion of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Count Gyula Andrássy, an open-air photo exhibition on the history of Andrássy Avenue is on display on one of the best-known roads in the Hungarian capital.

Count Gyula Andrássy was born two hundred years ago, on March 8, 1823. The open-air exhibition commemorates the former prime minister of the country, the founder of the avenue and honorary citizen of Terézváros, Budapest’s District 6, thus joining the Budapest150 series of events, according to a statement sent by the Terézváros Municipality to MTI.

The open-air exhibition on both sides of Andrássy Avenue present the history of the avenue from 1900 to the present day with 40 photographs. A short walk through the photos shows how traffic and the function of the road has changed, but the pictures also bring important historical moments to life: the May Day parades, the opening of the big department store ‘Párisi Nagyáruház’, the bloody flag demonstration of 1956, and even Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi on a motorbike in one of the pictures taken on Andrássy Avenue.

In the press release, it is recalled that today's Andrássy Street was originally called Sugárút [Avenue], and later named after Prime Minister Gyula Andrássy. After the Second World War, it bore the name of Stalin, and was also known as the Hungarian Youth Road and the Road of the People's Republic, before it was renamed Andrássy Avenue after the regime change of 1989-90.