Crests are being replaced on the Hungarian Parliament Building, but why?
Photo: BJ/Daily News Hungary
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Construction started on the Parliament Building at the beginning of March. Since then it has turned out that many of crests are being replaced out of the 386 coat of arms that are currently on the building’s façade.
One of the most well-known crests on the Hungarian Parliament Building is Hungary’s historical coat of arms, which is located on the facade of the main entrance wing. Above the entrance arches, we can see the six crests of the former parts of Hungary, including Croatia, Rijeka, Transylvania, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, Index reports.
A crest gallery of 56 coat of arms was included in Steindl’s originals plans for the building in 1883. However, his plans were revised several times in the following years, and the final plans covered a total of 386 crests.
However, the 63 Hungarian counties and 59 cities together did not have enough crests to fill all those empty slots in the plans, so designers needed to improvise.
Because they did not have enough to work with, designers decided to replicate the crests without any sort of logic whatsoever, randomly. Most cities appear twice, but the crest of Debrecen appears only once, while Budapest’s appears 5 times, and Zala county’s crest appears ten times on the building.
Now, it has been decided that new ones will replace all the duplicates on the side façade of the city wing, and city crests will replace all county crests on the North and South wings. Thus, there will be 120 empty slots for the coat of arms.
What will go up there?
Here is the list of all the cities whose crests are going up the façade of the Parliament Building:
