Welcome, dear visitor to the houses of Parliament! Allow me to introduce myself, I am the Holy Crown, and I have lived here in the houses of Parliament for more than two decades now alongside the sceptre and the orb. So much has happened to me over the past 800 years that not much surprises me anymore. It's even hard for me to say exactly how old I am. We know that the crown of St. Stephen – who was crowned in 1000 A.D. – was donated by Pope Sylvester II, but that crown was not yet me. What is certain is that I left the country for the first time in 1205, which means that by then I had already become the crown. In addition to the many questions, there are of course some certainties you can know about me. First of all, I have two parts. My lower, circular part is called the Greek crown, because the inscriptions on it are in Greek, while my upper, banded part is called the Latin crown, as you might have guessed, that’s because of the Latin inscriptions. My crooked cross wasn't always crooked, but it wasn't always part of me either. It is thought that I acquired that in the 16th century. I am the symbol of Hungarian statehood, and accordingly the Hungarian kings were crowned with me long ago, and there was a particular way of doing that, too (even if they sometimes deviated from it). The king was to be crowned with me by the archbishop of Esztergom in Székesfehérvár. The queen was also crowned with me, but I only touched her right shoulder. After that I could rest easy because the kings didn't actually wear me, but let's just say that a lot of people wanted to get their hands on me, so I visited quite a few places and countries, even America. I returned from there in 1978, and since then I have not crossed the border again.