Szekesfehervar Hungary

Zeesfehervar, the Romans' Herculia or Alba Regia, was in medieval times the spiritual centre of Hungary. Until 1527, the kings were crowned in the town and most members of the royal family were buried there. Between 1543 and 1688, the city fell into neglect under the Turkish occupation and most of the medieval architecture was destroyed, but the routing of the Turks led here, as in so many other settlements in the country, to a flourishing of Baroque architecture, so that the old town has a picturesque and rambling street plan dotted with many charming examples of eighteenth-century architecture, usually of the Zopf, or late Louis Seize, variety.

The centre of the town is the Szabadsag ter. The large Council Hall consists of a western wing built in 1690 and an eastern wing of three storeys constructed at the end of the eighteenth century in a late Baroque style.

In the same square stands the more spirited Bishop's Palace, designed by Jakob Rieder and built between 1790 and 1801. The facade, with its pairs of Corinthian pilasters, is rather Neo-C1assical, the entire front being crowned with a massive coat of arms. The interior contains rooms in empire and Biedermeier styles and the library possesses over 40,000 volumes (apply to the porter).

At the eastern end of Szabadsag Square is a lapidarium with several medieval objects dating from the destroyed eleventh-century royal bas¬ilica, where kings were crowned and buried. A sarcophagus described as Venetian-Byzantine is reputed to have been the tomb of Stephen I, the first King of Hungary.

Wandering along the Marcius 15 utca brings us to another treasure of the city, the Cistercian church, constructed in the 1750s. Its Baroque interior is rather upstaged by the magnificent Rococo cabinets in the sacristy. A former Jesuits' chemist's with a Rococo interior is nearby at the sign of the Black Eagle, as is also the nineteenth-century Vorosmarty theatre.

Nearby is the town museum or Istvan Kiraly house in the Gagarin Square. Old photographs, models and the usual post-1945 reconstruction exhibits are displayed here. Not far from the Arany Janos utca is the cathedral. The building is Baroque and both the sanctuary and the main altar are the work of Franz Anton Hillebrandt, whose name we have encountered in Vienna. It strikes a note of a grander order, serious but lavish.

The ceiling of the nave is decorated with scenes from the life of King Stephen 1. In the crypt are to be seen the red marble caskets of the Hungarian King Bela III who ruled from 1174 to 1196. Near the cathedral stands the Gothic St Anne chapel, which was built in about 1470. It is an impressive building whose three high Gothic windows are accented by a curious lantern on the roof. A small but intricate rose window has been cut through the thick masonry of the west end. The interior, a single space vaulted by thin ribs, is sombre.

The Churches of Hungary

In the Petofi Sandor utca rises the former Baroque church of the Carmelites, which contains a series of superb frescoes executed before 1770 by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, illustrating various scenes from the New Testament. The chancel contains a work by the eighteenth-century Bavarian sculptor Hauser and some contemporary Baroque stalls. Next door in the former seminary of the Carmelites is a museum of eccles¬iastical art.

The Serbian Orthodox church in the Rae utca is also worth visiting. It is an eighteenth-century building, Baroque in style, and probably the work of a certain Janos Kerschoffer. The choir is semicircular under¬neath a half-dome, with ceiling frescoes illustrating scenes from the life of Christ and John the Baptist. The Rococo icon screen is one of the best of its kind in the country. There is a strange incongruity between this and the Baroque exterior, especially noticeable after a few moments have been spent contemplating the Byzantine style of the rest of the interior.

Szombathely and Fertod Hungary

If, instead of returning to Budapest,the traveller wishes to go back to Vienna from Balaton, efforts should be made to visit Szombathely and Fertod, where there are other treasures.Szombathely, the Savaria of the Romans, is another city with a late eighteenth-century character to its centre. The square at the heart of the settlement is Berzsenyi Daniel ter, which predictably enough is dominated by a Bishop's Palace, the work of Menyhert Hefele and dating from 1779.

Maulbertsch and Dorfmeister were responsible for the frescoes inside, although experts say that neither artist excelled himself here. Hefele left his stamp on Szombathely in a way few other Hungarian architects were able to in other places. He was responsible not only for several of the buildings around the Bishop's Palace but also for the cathedral to the north, the conservatorium opposite it and the cathedral school a case of 'Si monumentum requiris circumspice' which is virtually unrivalled in any Central European city of this size.

The remains of the Roman basilica of St Quirinus, including a beauti¬ful mosaic floor and some sections of Roman military road, are to be found in a lapidarium between the school and the cathedral. Sad to say, though the Hungarian guides seem quite proud of it, a 'modern espresso' has been built in this 'historic setting'.

In the Majakovszkij ter south of the main square, there are the remains of a temple dedicated to the worship of Isis. Savaria seems to have been the northernmost centre of the Isis cult and fragments of the temple are displayed here along with some thousands of other related objects. Those interested in archaeology should also visit the Savaria Museum, which is in the eastern part of the inner city near the railway station. The Fran¬ciscan church nearby, originating in the fifteenth century but rebuilt somewhat licentiously in the seventeenth century, is also worth a glance.

West of Szombathely Hungary

West of Szombathely, on the Austrian frontier, is Koszeg. A small town of barely fifteen thousand inhabitants, it is the highest town in Hungary (300 metres above sea level), almost in the foothills of the Alps. We enter by way of the 'Heroes Gate', erected in 1932 to commemorate the 400th anniversary of the great siege, when a handful of Hungarians held up a force of Turks twenty times its size for over a month.

The medieval Jurisich ter, named after the defenders' leader, is the site of the Baroque St Imre's church, constructed in the early seventeenth century. Some of this church dates from medieval times and the detailing is both Renaissance and Gothic. Next to it stands the altogether more restrained Gothic St James church dating from 1400 and evoking Teutonic earnestness. Here the mixture is partly Baroque and partly Gothic, but the splendid wall paintings are fifteenth-century.

The Town Hall nearby is Gothic in origin but was rebuilt in the Baroque period at the same time as the house opposite, whose sgraffito work dates from 1668. The narrow streets which lead from here to the castle are all worth exploring. An old drawbridge leads to the massive inner fortress which houses a museum and a very pleasant wine cellar.

The Strucc Hotel on the corner of Koztarsasag ter was built at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is the obvious place to stay, despite its modernized interior. Its rooms have views onto the many bastions and towers which survive from the castle's still impressive line of fortifications. Above, a high Calvary church with three steeples built between 1729 and 1735 looks down onto the town and its sur¬roundings. At dusk, as the light recedes across the hills towards the Alps, the streets are almost deserted.

The Esterhazy Palace at Fertod Hungary

From here, with Austria so clearly visible, the last of Hungary's varied treasures beckons, if only to remind one of the great families who built the country into such a powerful force in the years after the Turks were routed. Few names conjure up Magyar nobility with such force as that of Esterhazy, and so it is fitting to leave Hungary paying our respects to the great Esterhazy palace at Fertod.

It is of course no longer the property of this once wealthy family. In Vienna and America, there are rooms adorned with photographs from before the last war of the castle and that last generation of Hungarians. Sometimes they are riding horses, sometimes they are pick¬nicking, but in the background the impressive building is always the same. Often proudly referred to by Hungarians as the Versailles of Central Europe, it is not quite as grand as either the palaces of the Sun¬ King or Maria Theresa, but as the palace of an aristocratic family it is without rival in Hungary.

Built between 1720 and 1766 for Prince Miklos Esterhazy, most of what is seen today was designed by the architect Anton Erhard Martinelli. Martinelli, it may be recalled, designed the Town Hall in Pest The rounded wings, however, are attributed to Miklos Jacoby (1733-84), 'and the transition to the central section has rightly been criticized for being discordant. The happier one-storey ranges which round off the court were erected in the 1760s by Johann Ferdinand Modlhammer.

Visitors enter by a splendid iron gate into the court. Although the palace suffered considerable damage in the Second World War, it has been splendidly restored. The guides offered by the palace administration are more than adequate and great care will be taken to explain the details of the two-storey ceremonial hall of the prince and princess and the de¬lightful series of Chinese rooms.

Part of these have been given over to a Haydn memorial museum. Between 1761 and 1790 Haydn was the court conductor of the Esterhazys and the theatre at Fertod was one of the centres of Rococo Europe, witnessing the first performances of many of Haydn's works. The state rooms were and still are a magnificent setting for that composer's music, even if the theatre and part of the temple complex in the gardens vanished forever in the last years of the war, sacrificed to the shrapnel of a new invading army.

Like so many great houses in Central Europe, the absence of any resident family gives the building a maudlin, empty atmosphere and it is only during the summer when concerts are regularly organized in the palace that something of its former glory is recovered. If we are lucky, we shall leave Hungary with the music of Haydn ringing in our ears.