Gellért Thermal Bath

This guide to Gellért Thermal Bath in Budapest moves between the doors closing for a siege in December 1944 and their opening twenty-six years earlier, in 1918, to a Budapest that had never seen anything like this Art Nouveau bathhouse. It follows Admiral Miklós Horthy's 1919 speech from its balcony and the bombing that gutted the building through January 1945. Listen for how plain the postwar rebuild left the rooms around you.