Hungarian Natural History Museum

This guide to the Hungarian Natural History Museum in Budapest centers on a scorched fin whale skull suspended overhead, harpooned in the Atlantic in 1896 and pinned to a wooden frame so it seems to swim through the hall. It traces the whale's survival through the shelling of the museum's old home during the 1956 uprising, a catastrophe that destroyed tens of thousands of specimens built up over generations of naturalists. This former military academy did not become the museum's home until the 1990s, so look around the hall itself as much as the whale above it.