Every Regime Left. The Hot Water Stayed.

Under Budapest, on a geological fault where the Buda hills drop away to the flat plain, more than a hundred springs push something like forty million liters of warm mineral water up to the surface every day. It has been doing this for as long as there has been a city here, and longer. Everything above the water — the empires, the languages, the secret police — arrived, built something on top of the springs, and left. The water stayed.

That’s the thing to hold onto, because Budapest will otherwise present itself as a confusion of grand facades, and the grandeur is a little misleading.

The Romans came first and called their town Aquincum, capital of a border province, and naturally they built baths. The Ottomans ruled for a century and a half and built more — the Rudas bath, an octagonal pool under a domed roof on eight pillars, put up by a Turkish governor around 1550, is still open, still hot, four and a half centuries later, light falling in colored shafts through the cupola. The Habsburgs built the enormous neo-Baroque Széchenyi in 1913, where to this day old men sit in thirty-eight-degree water playing chess on floating boards while, in winter, snow comes down on their heads. Four rulers, four architectures, one set of springs. The baths are the only institution in this city that every regime agreed was worth keeping.

So how long do you need?

Three days does the panorama — Parliament, the Castle, the great synagogue, one bath, the Chain Bridge. But Budapest warms slowly, the way a long friendship warms, and three days catches it still being polite. Five to seven, and you start getting past the facades into the districts, which is where the city actually lives.

And you need to understand the facades, because they’re wearing borrowed clothes. In a single burst of confidence between the joining of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda into one city in 1873 and the outbreak of war in 1914, Budapest built itself the wardrobe of a Great Power: a parliament with six hundred and ninety-one rooms, a boulevard modeled on Paris, the first electric underground railway on the European continent, opened in 1896. It was dressing for its role as the co-capital of an empire of fifty million people. Then the empire lost the war, and in 1920 the treaty that followed handed away two-thirds of the country, and Budapest was left standing there in the clothes of an imperial capital it no longer was. The grandeur you photograph is real. It’s also orphaned. The city was built two sizes too big for the country it ended up in.

What does that feel like on the ground?

It feels like a place living inside several centuries at once, none of them cleaned up. Walk down Andrássy Avenue and you’re in the confident 1890s. Turn into the old Jewish quarter and you’re in the winter of 1944, when the Arrow Cross herded the city’s Jews into a ghetto a few streets wide. Get on the little 1896 metro and you’re in the grey of the Soviet decades. Vienna smoothed all of this into a single polished surface; Budapest never did. There are still bullet holes from 1956 left in the stone of buildings on the main squares, at eye level, unremarked. The city wears its wear.

And that refusal to tidy up is where the real thing is.

Take the House of Terror, on Andrássy Avenue at number sixty. It’s an ordinary grand apartment building, and it was the headquarters of the fascist Arrow Cross, and then — the same address, the same cellars — it became the headquarters of the Communist secret police. Two totalitarian regimes ran their terror out of the identical building, one after the other, and now it’s a museum, and the point it makes just by being one address is sharper than anything on the walls inside. Down on the riverbank there are sixty pairs of iron shoes bolted to the stone, a memorial to the Jews the Arrow Cross shot into the Danube in the winter of 1944 and 1945, after making them take their shoes off because leather was worth money. It is the quietest, heaviest thing in the city.

But Budapest keeps the rescue as well as the murder, if you know where to look. A few minutes from the basilica, at Vadász Street number twenty-nine, is a former glass factory called the Glass House, where a Swiss diplomat named Carl Lutz sheltered more than three thousand people and, by handing out protective papers he had no real authority to issue, is credited with saving tens of thousands. Almost nobody goes. The memorial to the murder is famous; the site of the rescue is a door most tourists walk past.

Want the older layers, the ones under the empire? Go north, out to Óbuda, where the Roman city is dug up in the open and the ancient bridge piers surface in the Danube when a dry summer drops the water. Climb the Rózsadomb to the little octagonal tomb of Gül Baba, a sixteenth-century Ottoman holy man — the northernmost Muslim pilgrimage site in the world, sitting in a quiet neighborhood of villas with a view of the city that nobody photographs, because it isn’t the view from the postcard.

Then there’s the tension every honest trip here runs into. The ruin bars — the first, Szimpla, opened in 2002 in a derelict building — made the old Jewish quarter one of the great nightlife districts of Europe, and in doing so drove the rents up and pushed out the working-class and Jewish institutions that gave the neighborhood its character in the first place. The thing that made the district worth discovering is being worn away by its discovery. A street over from the bars, on Kazinczy Street, the actual Jewish community is still there, quietly, among the vintage shops — a reminder that the quarter is a living place and not only a set for stag parties.

Which is the open question the city leaves you with, and it comes back to the water. Everything above ground here was built by a power that then lost — the Romans, the Turks, the Habsburgs, the Soviets — and Budapest’s genius has always been to outlast whoever was on top of it, the way the springs outlast every bath house built over them. But the force bearing down on it now isn’t an empire or an occupier. It’s twenty-odd million visitors a year and the money that follows them, loving the city’s melancholy until it becomes a product. That’s a harder thing to outlast than a regime, because it doesn’t leave. The hot water will keep rising whatever happens. The question is what’s left standing over it to enjoy.