Budapest Zoo & Botanical Garden

This guide to Budapest Zoo & Botanical Garden centers on the siege of Budapest, the winter battle of 1944 into 1945 that tore through the zoo's enclosures and left only a fraction of its roughly two thousand animals alive. It turns to the Elephant House rising nearby, built between 1909 and 1912 by architect Kornel Neuschloss in an orientalist fantasy of onion domes and glazed Zsolnay tiles meant to look like a storybook palace. You'll hear what happened to the zoo's starving neighbors who crawled out of their cellars that winter. Look closely at the tilework this building somehow kept intact.