Hey Detroit, watch out: there is a Cadillac museum in Hungary!

It may not be the biggest or most famous Cadillac museum, but it has a unique feature that makes it unlike any other.

Published in

Eastern Chronicles

5 min readJul 23, 2015

One of my favorite places from our Eastern Chronicles trip to Hungary was definitely the Cadillac Museum. We found this must-visit destination in the lovely town of Keszthely, which lies on the western shore of Lake Balaton.

On our way to the museum we passed through the center of Keszthely, and we were not disappointed with what we saw along the way. The streets were filled with small shops and charming restaurants with front patios that welcomed you to enjoy your lunch in a lovely, familiar atmosphere.

How to get to Cadillac Museum in Keszthely:

We also passed a few museum signs that caught our attention, such as the Radio and Television Museum, the Marzipan Museum, and the Puppenmuseum-Panoptikum-Snail Parliment, which is considered the greatest doll museum in Eastern Europe. We didn’t have the time to visit them all, but they definitely made it onto our bucket list for any future trip to Hungary.

I have to be honest and say that when we arrived at the Cadillac Museum the outside didn’t look like much. I was almost a bit disappointed, but the feeling only lasted until I got inside.

At the front desk we paid the entrance fee and, lucky me, I got a student discount. After paying, we received a printed manual with information about the museum and all of the cars on display. These were available in several languages, including English, which was a big relief for me, since I am totally unfamiliar with the Hungarian language. We also asked if we were allowed to take photos, and we were glad to find out that we could. There were two rooms to visit: one had 4 cars and the other had 5; we started with the smaller one first.

We entered the first room which had 4 cars lined up next to each other. Even though there wasn’t that much space, we were still able to walk between the cars and take a close look at each of them. As we crossed the threshold, the first car to catch our eyes was a red 1923 Cadillac Phaeton Convertible. This car was the star of the show. Why? Because not only were we able to see the owner start it in front of us, but we also found out later that both the car and the owner had appeared in the mini-series “Houdini,” starring the famous Adrien Brody. The owner showed us a short scene of the series in which we saw both the car and him as the driver.

The second car in line was a brown 1932-ES Cadillac LaSalle. In a backseat window was a poster depicting the movie “The Godfather: Part 1,” and a picture of Sonny along with a car that very much resembled the model of the car I was looking at. Written on this poster, in Hungarian, was something that I was not able to read, but I found out later from the owner that his car was the actual one that had appeared in the film. The owner actually showed us the scene in the movie where the car appears and told us himself that this is the same car.

This 1932 Cadillac LaSalle appeared in The Godfather movie

Even though these two cars had such amazing stories behind them, all of the cars were worth admiring and photographing. I can honestly say that I looked more through my photo lens than I did with my own eyes. Some of the other cars had picture books beside them that showed how they started out as mere parts or just in a mess; comparing these pictures to how they ended up was just mind blowing. The walls of the two rooms were also covered in bits of history through photos and quotes, but they were also in Hungarian, so I could only admire the pictures which spoke on their own.

Due to my lack of knowledge of the Hungarian language, I learned of these amazing stories only at the end of the tour, once the museum employee kindly translated the owner’s words to us. I was already fascinated by the cars, but the stories about their history just topped off the entire tour.