Five centuries of Central European architecture, in six buildings

Central Europe rewards the patient traveller. Its architectural history is not legible at a glance; it requires a willingness to look past the tourist circuit, to duck into courtyards and peer through railings, to ask questions of locals who may not understand why you find a crumbling Baroque façade worth photographing.

What follows is not a comprehensive survey. It is a list of six buildings — one from each century between the fifteenth and the twentieth — that, taken together, tell something essential about how this part of the world has been built, torn down, rebuilt, occupied and reimagined.

1. The Parish Church of St Nicholas, Trnava (1380–1421)

Gothic architecture in Central Europe arrived later than in France and England, and stayed longer. The church of St Nicholas in what is now western Slovakia is a good example of why: its builders were not interested in innovation for its own sake. They wanted height, light and permanence, and they achieved all three.

2. The Esterházy Palace, Fertőd (1762–1766)

When Prince Nikolaus Esterházy decided to build a palace that would outshine Versailles, he was not joking. Fertőd — once called Eszterháza — is the most extravagant statement of aristocratic ambition in the Hungarian countryside, a place where Haydn spent most of his working life and where the prince received guests in a hall of mirrors that still, on certain mornings, manages to be astonishing.

It fell into decay after the Second World War. Restoration has been ongoing since the 1950s, with uneven results. But the bones are extraordinary.

3. The Adria Palace, Prague (1923–1925)

Czech Rondo-Cubism is one of the most distinctive and least imitated architectural styles of the twentieth century. The Adria Palace, designed by Pavel Janák and Josef Zasche, is its finest commercial expression: a building that manages to be monumental and playful at once, its curved forms suggesting something between Art Nouveau and an ancient temple.