I wasn’t the happiest camper when Ryan told me late the night before that we had 9 AM tour tickets to see the Parlamento, or the parliament building of Budapest. The tours are notoriously crowded during the rest of the day, hence the early hour—and once we arrived, I was glad Ryan insisted on it.

This parliament building is among the most beautiful we’ve ever seen, both inside and out. The interior hallways, domes, and even doorways are so carefully decorated that every detail is noteworthy, but the combined effect is far from overwhelming.

We saw the crown jewels, which Hungary handed over to the U.S. for safe-keeping during Nazi and Soviet occupation (the U.S. returned the crown only a few decades ago, when all was safe again); we saw the congress chambers, where important governmental decisions are still made to this day; ...

...and we saw one of the most grand two-stairway entrances I’d ever seen, which only opens with the induction of new congress members every few years.

Listening to our tour guide.

A Red Star from the Soviet era, which was perched on the roof of Parliament until 1990.

The flag of the 1956 revolution.

We took this just outside Parliament in the underground 1956 memorial. On October 23, 1956, Hungary made a bold statement against Soviet occupation and the terror it inflicted on government members and low-class families alike. No one was safe under their rule, and Hungary peacefully reminded the occupying soldiers that they were a free nation. For about an hour, it seemed like the Soviets agreed, and were stepping back; so crowds gathered together in front of the parliament building to celebrate and sing Hungary’s national anthem. Not a single person in the crowd was armed, and no one made so much as a move toward the Soviet soldiers who were watching.

And then, out of nowhere, Soviet snipers began shooting into the crowds. Other soldiers followed suit, climbed into their tanks (the U.S.S.R. had sent almost 200 to Hungary to remind local governments who was in charge), and began mowing through the crowds, shooting everyone in sight.

This 1956 revolution—also called the 1956 massacre—is one of the most scarring memories in Hungary’s past, and so many citizens are still alive who watched the slaughter of friends and family members in a single day. Soon after, the Soviets captured (and later, publicly executed) Hungary’s beloved—and gently anti-Soviet—leader, who is commemorated in a statue that stands looking across the square at the Parlamento.

So it should be easy to imagine how a 1956 memorial might be a horrific experience. They’d gathered video footage, photos, testimonies, and other relics from the days and weeks that followed. We were both a mess.

We toured the inside of St. Stephens, the most renowned church in Budapest (and, possibly, in Hungary).

Although the interior was absolutely beautiful, we were particularly excited about climbing up to the dome for a bird’s eye view of the city.

Ryan would like to draw attention to just how many domes we climbed throughout our honeymoon. There were so, so many, and this was the last one (taken during our climb).

The inside of the dome.

Looking out over Pest. In the distance (where it gets hilly), you can see Buda.

(:

The Dohány Street Synagogue, the second largest synagogue in the world (after Manhattan’s shockingly huge temple, which Ryan has also explored). This synagogue envelopes part of the area where the Nazis kept a vast majority of Budapest’s Jewish population in badly cramped living conditions, which allowed illness and infection to run rampant. When the Soviets assumed control of the country, they entered the main square of the synagogue to find thousands of bodies piled up in the center. Those bodies now rest in the ground beneath it as a graveyard dedicated against war and anti-semitism. At the end of the square is an upside-down Menorah that creates a metal weeping willow—the Tree of Life—where every leaf is engraved with the name of someone lost in the holocaust.

The House of Terror. Without going into too much detail, this museum is exactly what it sounds like: The former Nazi—and then Soviet—headquarters and torture chambers, now used as a monument to the terrors faced in Hungary between the Warsaw Pact and the fall of communism many, many decades later. It was one of the hardest museums I’ve ever gone through, but was also one of our favorites—and we spent so long reading each and every word from room to room that we spent the entire afternoon there, and were kicked out just before closing.

Budapest’s Museum of Music History (Zenetörténeti Múzeum), which had a special exhibit on Bella Bartók when we visited. Ryan was in heaven, particularly at seeing dozens of centuries-old instruments.

Matthias (Matyás) Church, which I particularly loved for its neat tile designs along the roof.

The inside of Matyás Church.

One of our last stops in Budapest was the most depressing one of our entire time there, let alone on our entire trip. (Note the reversal of that sentiment: As much as we loved Budapest, there’s no questioning the fact that it boasted the most depressing histories of any place we’d seen that month.) Tucked deep into the hill is the Sziklakórház (Felsenkrankenhaus), the “Hospital in the Rock.” This hospital was carved into a system of prehistoric tunnels in the 1930s, in preparation for WWII—a war that was so much bloodier than they expected that victims slept two or three to a (twin-sized) bed, that the hospital ran out of food and supplies, and that nurses had to take bandages off corpses and sterilize them (if they had water to do so, which they sometimes didn’t) before reusing them. They’d wait out the bombs during the day while taking care of hundreds of dead and dying, and would wheelbarrow the corpses out at night—when the bombing had died down—to bury them in bomb craters.

During Soviet rule, the hospital was repurposed as a nuclear bunker, which—thank God—was never used. This was the part that was so incredibly depressing, given our current political climate: We were walked through rooms whose entire purpose was to heal—a best as possible—survivors of a nuclear explosion before admitting them into the hospital (i.e., via shaving, washing, burning clothes and hair). But after seeing photos of what victims’s bodies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked like after the explosion—that is, those who weren’t vaporized immediately from the blast—and after seeing the effect of that extreme heat on metals and other objects, the hospital tour reminded us that the bombs dropped in WWII are more than 1,000 times smaller than those held by Russia today. They showed maps of major cities around the world, with colored rings symbolizing the radius of immediate death by vaporization and the radius of fatal burns and radiation exposure (e.g., a bomb in D.C. would still lead to exposure all the way up the east coast). By the time we left the bunker, I was a hyperventilating disaster. The final quote we saw as we headed back to the surface was “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Fisherman’s Bastion—named for the guild of fisherman who were tasked with defending the hill during the Middle Ages—offered fairy tale-like turrets and towers behind the church, where it looked down at the Danube and Pest far below.