The Most Beautiful Synagogues in Europe
10 places in 7 countries · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful synagogues in Europe are Dohány Street Synagogue (Hungary), Spanish Synagogue, Prague (Czech Republic) and Synagogue of El Transito (Spain). The list covers 10 synagogues in 7 countries. The Czech Republic has the most, with 2. Last updated 13 October 2026.
Europe's synagogues carry a long and uneven history. In medieval Spain, Jewish communities built prayer halls in the same Mudéjar style as the palaces and mosques around them. In the seventeenth century, Sephardic refugees in Amsterdam raised one of the great houses of worship of the age. After emancipation in the nineteenth century, Jewish communities in Central Europe built monumental synagogues, often in a Moorish Revival style that recalled the golden age of Jewish life in Spain. Many were destroyed in the Holocaust, which gives those that survive particular weight.
The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest is the largest in Europe, its twin onion-domed towers framing a Moorish facade. In Prague, the Spanish Synagogue is covered inside with gilded and painted arabesques, and the Jubilee Synagogue nearby has a striking facade in red, white and blue. The Great Synagogue of Florence lifts a green copper dome above the city, the domed Szeged Synagogue was designed by Lipót Baumhorn, and the Subotica Synagogue is a masterpiece of Hungarian Art Nouveau.
Older buildings tell of earlier communities. In Toledo, the Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca is a hall of white horseshoe arches, and the Synagogue of El Tránsito, built in the fourteenth century by Samuel ha-Levi, preserves carved stucco and Hebrew inscriptions. The Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam, completed in 1675, still has a sand-covered floor and is lit by candles. In Poland, the Łańcut Synagogue has a baroque interior of painted walls and stucco.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dohány Street Synagogue | Synagogue | Hungary | |
| 2 | Spanish Synagogue, Prague | Synagogue | Czech Republic | |
| 3 | Synagogue of El Transito | Synagogue | Spain | |
| 4 | Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam | Synagogue | Kingdom of the Netherlands | |
| 5 | Subotica Synagogue | Synagogue | Serbia | |
| 6 | Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca | Synagogue | Spain | |
| 7 | Szeged Synagogue | Synagogue | Hungary | |
| 8 | Great Synagogue of Florence | Synagogue | Italy | |
| 9 | Jubilee Synagogue, Prague | Synagogue | Czech Republic | |
| 10 | Łańcut Synagogue | Synagogue | Poland |
01 Dohány Street Synagogue
Dohány utcai zsinagóga
Hungary · 1.7 km from Budapest47.496° N 19.061° E
Suicasmo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Seen from the street, the façade is a composition in yellow and red brick, patterned in bands, with a rose window over the entrance and two octagonal towers crowned with onion domes some 43 metres high. The interior is vast: 75 metres long and 27 wide, with a nave spanned by cast iron, seats for nearly three thousand people — men below, women in the galleries — and a richly painted and gilded surface of arabesques and geometric ornament. The synagogue has an organ, unusual for a synagogue and a sign of its Neolog character; the original instrument of 1859 was played by Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saëns, and a new organ by Jehmlich of Dresden replaced it in 1996.
Did you know? Its seats are split almost evenly, with 1,492 places for men on the floor and 1,472 for women in the galleries.
02 Spanish Synagogue, Prague
Španělská synagoga
Czech Republic · 0.4 km from Prague50.090° N 14.421° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 From outside the building is a restrained square block with a dome. The surprise is inside, where between 1882 and 1893 Antonín Baum and Bedřich Münzberger covered every surface in stucco and paint. Stylised arabesques in gold, red, green and blue run over walls, galleries, doors and the ceiling, so dense that the whole room seems woven rather than built. A dome crowns the square hall, three sides of it wrapped in galleries, and a large stained-glass window with a Star of David sets the colours glowing when the sun is on it. The gilded, multi-coloured arabesque is the building's signature, and it makes the room feel like a single jewelled box.
Did you know? The Altschul it replaced is thought to have been the oldest house of prayer in Prague's Jewish Town; it was pulled down in 1867.
03 Synagogue of El Transito
Sinagoga del Tránsito
Spain · 1.7 km from Toledo39.856° N 4.029° W
Selbymay · CC BY-SA 3.0 Its patron was Samuel ha-Levi Abulafia, treasurer and counsellor to King Peter of Castile. The building went up around 1357 as a private house of prayer attached to his palace in Toledo's Jewish quarter, and its master builder is recorded as Don Meir Abdeil. 5 metres and rises some 12 metres to its ceiling. Its decoration echoes the Nasrid stucco work of the Alhambra, which Samuel knew from his dealings with the court of Granada, and the Hebrew texts praise both the king and Samuel himself. The east wall, which held the Torah ark, carries the richest ornament, and a gallery along the south wall with five wide openings was reserved for women.
Did you know? After 1492 the Order of Calatrava turned the hall into the church of its priory of San Benito, which also housed the archives of the Calatrava and Alcántara orders.
04 Portuguese Synagogue, Amsterdam
Portugees-Israëlietische Synagoge
Kingdom of the Netherlands · 1.8 km from Amsterdam52.367° N 4.905° E
Tadeáš Bednarz · CC BY-SA 4.0 The interior is what people remember. Instead of electric light the main hall is lit by candles: four great brass chandeliers and wall sconces hold around a thousand of them, and seventy-two windows let in daylight from every side. Twelve stone columns, one for each of the tribes of Israel, carry the women's galleries. The original wooden benches remain, and the floor is covered in fine sand, a custom kept by only a handful of synagogues in the world. At the east end stands the great ark, made in 1744 from Brazilian jacaranda wood; the building is oriented so that it faces towards Jerusalem.
Did you know? Its design is said to have been based on plans of the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem.
05 Subotica Synagogue
Суботичка синагога
Serbia · 3.8 km from Subotica46.102° N 19.661° E
Ванилица · CC BY-SA 4.0 Outside, the building bursts with colour. Glazed ceramic from the Zsolnay works in Pécs, famous for its iridescent finishes, covers roofs and trims, and stylised hearts, tulips, roses and palmettes run across the walls — the motifs of Hungarian peasant embroidery, translated into terracotta and glaze. The plan is not the usual long basilica but a single, tent-like central space under a dome some 40 metres high, a remarkably thin shell carried on a modern steel frame, with pillars dressed in plaster and wreathed in relief palm leaves.
Did you know? The domed shell is astonishingly thin, only about 3 to 5 centimetres of concrete over its steel frame.
06 Synagogue of Santa María la Blanca
Sinagoga de Santa María la Blanca
Spain · 1.6 km from Toledo39.857° N 4.030° W
Fernando · CC BY-SA 4.0 The effect inside is startling for so modest an exterior. A brick hall roughly 27 metres long is divided into five aisles, the central one slightly wider, by rows of octagonal piers — twenty-four free-standing and eight set into the walls. They carry long ranks of horseshoe arches, and everything is washed in plain white, so that the eye goes straight to the capitals: finely carved pine cones, scrolls and leaves in pale plaster, each slightly different. With its forest of arches the space reads more like a small mosque than a house of Jewish prayer, and that ambiguity is its beauty.
Did you know? Its forms are closest to 12th-century Almohad mosques in Morocco such as Tinmal and the Kutubiyya in Marrakesh.
07 Szeged Synagogue
Szegedi zsinagóga
Hungary · 0.7 km from Szeged46.254° N 20.143° E
Somorjai Ferenc · CC BY-SA 3.0 Much of its character comes from Chief Rabbi Immánuel Lőw, a scholar of the plants of the Bible, who worked closely with Baumhorn on the decoration. The interior is conceived as a garden of scripture: painted and carved flowers and trees, some chosen as plants of the Land of Israel, others as the flora of Hungary, climb the walls in ivory, blue and gold. The door of the Torah ark is of acacia wood from the Nile — the wood named in the Bible for the Tabernacle — and its hinges take the shape of hyssop; the altar stone is closed with Jerusalem marble. On the triumphal arch, "Love your neighbour as yourself" is written in Hebrew and in Hungarian.
Did you know? Lőw succeeded his own father, the reformer Leopold Lőw, as rabbi of Szeged in 1878 and served the city for more than six decades.
08 Great Synagogue of Florence
Sinagoga di Firenze
Italy · 1.5 km from Florence43.773° N 11.266° E
דני · CC BY-SA 2.5 The design mixes Italian tradition with the Moorish Revival fashionable at the time. The façade combines white travertine with pink-toned stone, and two side towers crowned by small cupolas frame the entrance. Over the centre rises a large dome on pendentives, modelled in spirit on Hagia Sophia; it is built as two shells, the inner one 34 metres high and the outer 47, and its copper was meant to oxidise to green so that it would stand out among the terracotta roofs of the Florentine skyline.
Did you know? Old photographs show the facade in bold red and beige stripes of alternating stone; the colours have since faded into a softer, mottled look.
09 Jubilee Synagogue, Prague
Jeruzalémská synagoga
Czech Republic · 0.7 km from Prague50.085° N 14.432° E
Image by Laura_Maxim from Pixabay It was built as a consequence of loss. At the turn of the 20th century Prague carried out a sweeping clearance of the old Jewish quarter, Josefov, and three synagogues were demolished in the process. The Jubilee Synagogue was built to replace them, designed by the Viennese architect Wilhelm Stiassny and executed by the builder Alois Richter, and completed in 1906. It was originally named in honour of the golden jubilee of Emperor Franz Joseph I in 1898. With room for about 850 worshippers, it was a statement of the confidence of Prague's Jewish community in the last years of the Habsburg monarchy.
Did you know? Above the entrance runs Psalm 118:20 in Hebrew, its letters doubling as a chronogram that spells out the Jewish year 5666, or 1906.
10 Łańcut Synagogue
Synagoga w Łańcucie
Poland · 17.4 km from Rzeszów50.068° N 22.232° E
Image by Jarosik99 from Pixabay The masonry synagogue was completed in 1761 on the site of an earlier wooden building destroyed by fire in 1733, and its construction was funded by Prince Stanisław Lubomirski, the owner of the town, whose family had encouraged Jewish settlement in Łańcut. It stands near the market square, beside the park of the Lubomirski residence. Architecturally it is a rare survivor of a type once found across the Polish lands: the vaulted masonry synagogue with a bimah-tower, in which the pillars of the reading platform carry the roof.
Did you know? The Hasidic master Elimelech of Lizhensk lived in Łańcut from 1770 to 1772, and from 1790 Yaakov Yitzchak Horowitz, later the Seer of Lublin, served there.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful synagogues in Europe?
- On our list, Dohány Street Synagogue (Hungary) ranks first, followed by Spanish Synagogue, Prague (Czech Republic) and Synagogue of El Transito (Spain).
- Which country has the most synagogues in Europe?
- In our collection, the most come from the Czech Republic (2), Hungary (2) and Spain (2).
- What is the largest synagogue in Europe?
- The Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, completed in 1859 to designs by Ludwig Förster, is the largest synagogue in Europe and one of the largest in the world, seating about 3,000 people.
- Why do many nineteenth-century synagogues look Moorish?
- The Moorish Revival style recalled the flourishing of Jewish culture in medieval Spain and emphasised the community's Eastern origins, distinguishing synagogues from the Gothic and classical churches around them.
- Why is there sand on the floor of the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam?
- The sand absorbs dust, moisture and the sound of footsteps. Tradition also links it to the Israelites' wandering in the desert and to the secret worship of Jews in Spain and Portugal.
- How many synagogues are on this list in Europe?
- The list covers 10 synagogues in 7 countries. The Czech Republic has the most, with 2.