Things to see in Esztergom Hungary
From here, the Bajcsy Zsilinszky lit leads to the Balassi Balint Museum, a charming collection of paintings, furniture and other objects illustrating Esztergom's history. The same building also houses the cathedral library, which was established over 800 years ago and includes codices dating from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries.
Along the Bajcsy Zsilinszky lit is the Bath Hotel (Fiirdo Szallo), which will supply a refreshing bath or some coffee and cakes. The Bajcsy lit leads to the Rakoczi ter, which offers an eccentric ensemble of Baroque buildings and the Town Hall. The restaurant at the corner of the square and Zalka Mate is a good resting point before following the Vorosmarty lit (Madach ter, Galamb lit and Attila lit) to the Calvary church on Szent Tamas hill, a gentle rise at the back of the town, for a final glimpse of the Danube Bend before returning to the capital.
If you hire a car from Budapest Airport,there are two further places of interest nearby which could be knocked off in a couple of hours. Otherwise, there is little lost by setting out to visit them both at leisure on the following day.
Gyor Hungary
The first of these western excursions from Budapest involves a pic¬turesque town which, despite the establishment of several industries around it, still retains a pleasant Baroque centre. The second is a monastery which in size and atmosphere is unrivalled even by the great foundations of Tuscany. Gyor, or Raab as it is known to German speakers, lies eighty miles from Budapest almost exactly half-way between Vienna and the Hun¬garian capital and is a suitable jumping-off point for visiting Lake Balaton.
At first sight, Gyor is rather disappointing. The railway station is a reasonable essay in forties fascist, but the buildings opposite all seem to have been erected in the last ten years. One recovers hope, though, at a large imposing edifice to the right. Grey and white Neo-Baroque, it looks rather like another of Helmer and Fellner's opera houses. In fact, it is the Town Hall, and its size and tower show how important the town was in the nineteenth century.
Almost opposite, a number of parallel roads lead to the old town centre, which is a small square of Baroque and Rococo buildings. The yellow church is sophisticated Baroque in plan and was built by the Carmelites in the 1720S. Its stalls have the ball motif we have seen in Vienna. The rest of the square contains a number of other noteworthy houses of the same period.
From here can be seen the old fortifications of the town, which for several years withstood the Turks. The Alkotmany litca, a pedestrianized street, contains an interesting portal at No. 17. The nearby Szechenyi Square is dominated by the fading blues and whites of the Minorites church erected with great largesse in the 1750S.
The interior possesses some exquisite frescoes which have avoided the restorer's heavy hand. Opposite is a red building with a pleasantly tiled roof, housing a town museum. The Jedlik Anyos utca eventually reaches a Baroque statue marking a road rising towards the cathedral. (The Dunaetel bar just below this monument will provide a glass of refreshing beer before the ascent to this rather Mediterranean-style building.)
The church bears the marks of many styles. Its main entrance has Neo-Classical lotus-leaf columns inspired by Napoleon's Egyptian campaigns, and an even grander 1938 classical door. Inside (when closed, a friendly red-faced gentleman in a house opposite the south entrance will usually open the church up) there are some more frescoes in the nave, a Gothic side chapel of 1404 with Romanesque remains, and a thirteenth-century gold bust of St Ladislaus, one of the most valuable pieces of goldsmith's art in the country.
Gyor Cathedral Hungary
Near the cathedral is a modern but not too offensive hotel (at the time of writing, still to be named) and a Neo-Gothic seminary. The Bishop's Palace, or Abbot's House as it is sometimes referred to, is partly Gothic. A rank garden through the entrance arch offers views of Gyor island, and a small inscription on the garden wall commemorates the year 1809, when, following the only battle fought during the Napoleonic wars on Hungarian soil, the French emperor stayed at Gyor. The island itself can be reached from the square with the Carmelite church, but it offers little of interest except a dramatically ruined synagogue, a Russian barracks and some leafy promenades. Compared with the Hungarian capital, few of the eating establish¬ments here can match the best of Hungarian cuisine.
Pannonhalma Hungary
It is difficult to describe the elation this monastery, set high on the last spur of a range of hills, can evoke. In the spring, with bright blue skies, one might almost be in Tuscany. Only the train, usually packed with Russian soldiers as it approaches the village below, reminds one of the east, as the Neo-Classical facade of the Benedictine's richest establish-ment in Hungary seigneurially rises up over the valley.
The station lies about a mile from the monastery and as the sun sets the walk is suitably invigorating. The foundations of the abbey were laid in 995 by Prince Geza and the church was consecrated in the year 1001. The entrance is between the Neo-Classical wing designed by Josef Engal and Janos Albert Packh in the 1820S and a curious 1940S Italian school block, which adds even more to the Tuscan atmosphere. The main entrance is straight ahead. This opens into a large hall with a staircase-well supported by slender iron columns. Downstairs are some fading but beautiful portraits of Franz Josef and some Benedictine pupils, all with a strong hint of japonisme in the colours, something quite rare in Central Europe.
Up the stairs and towards the tower, however, is a Gothic cloister which in turn has a Romanesque entrance to the church for the monks and a humbler door for the congregation. Here, on a wall just before the entrance, are some of the architect's original elevations for the building, showing that only a part ofPackh's initial ambitious plans were executed, though what there is is splendid enough for a prince.
Inside the chapel, there broods a dark Gothic, refreshingly northern in atmosphere. In keeping with monastic practice, the church is built on three levels, one for the monks, another for the clergy and another for the laity. A crypt below the middle floor is partly Romanesque and partly Gothic. At precisely 19.05, vespers with Gregorian chants can be heard while those who are able to avail themselves of monastic hospitality can look forward to rising with the sun for Lauds at 5.45. These services, with their earnest closely cropped monks whose life-style is rather more austere than that enjoyed by the Benedictines in England, are solemn occasions, as moving as anything in the Romanesque abbeys of France.
A rather overgrown but none the less picturesque botanical garden drops down from behind the monastery while above, the spectacular Neo-Classical library boasts, in addition to a rather dashing statue of the Emperor Francis I, 30,000 volumes.
Pannonhalma is a severe if welcome oasis of calm scholarship. It is still a fee-paying boarding school – which was a remarkable achievement in any communist country and the terrace, with its incomparable views, is as good a place as any in which to contemplate a tour of the rest of Hungary.
Eastern Hungary from Budapest
From Budapest eastwards, the railway and motorway pass some of the flattest and dullest landscape in the world. The Great Central European plain, over which the Mongol hordes swarmed, is a lonely place which has played upon the imagination of travellers to Central Europe for centuries. The Puszta, as this plain is called, so excited the ingenuity of British intelligence during the last war that a plan was seriously considered whereby the 'Fortress Europe' of the Nazis would be set ablaze by a vast fire ignited here by thousands of balloons flown from England laden with incendiaries. Travelling across its seemingly interminable expanse, it seems at times that this would have been a suitable fate for so unexciting a landscape.
Its fifty thousand square kilometres once boasted a unique way of life, dominated by herdsmen who dressed in picturesque attire and looked after thousands of wild horses and cattle. Although, as can be seen in neighbouring Transylvania, this way of life is not completely extinct, to all intents and purposes it died in Hungary after the war, with the country's swift transition to a modern mechanized agricultural economy.
Debrecen Hungary Cheap Car hire for Airports
The best place from which to explore the plain, small villages being rare settlements on the Puszta are never more than a few houses is the interesting city of Debrecen (trains on the eastern railway take four hours from Budapest), whose name is syrtonymous with a delicious sausage known throughout Central Europe as a 'Debreziner'.
Debrecen has always played an important role in Hungary's history and has been a busy trading centre since the Middle Ages. With the establish¬ment of a Calvinist college in 1546, it became the heart of the Hungarian reformation. It was here that the Hungarian patriot Kossuth deposed the Habsburgs in the revolution of 1848. During the winter of 1944-5, Debrecen again became the capital of Hungary, as the last German units in the country were repulsed by the invading Soviet army.
Primarily an agricultural town, Debrecen has suffered a number of unfortunate planning decisions. The need to set up an 'industrial zone' has led to it becoming a far less picturesque place than it once was. Nevertheless, there is much to see, and the oldest parts of the town behind the main boulevards are a remarkably tranquil urban ensemble.
The centre of the inner town is the Voros Hadsereg utja which, in common with most cities of the plain, is as wide as a square. The early nineteenth-century Calvinist church, situated at the north end of the road, can rightly be called the heart of the city. Its yellow mass, with an interesting if rather severe Neo-Classical facade, is fifty-five metres long it is the largest Protestant church in Hungary. It was built to the designs of a military engineer by the name of Mihaly Pechy, but his original plans were adapted by Josef Tallherr, to whom the facade's Ionic order is attributed.
Inside, the three aisles emphasize the rather austere tenets of the Calvinist church. The chancel is the work of Samuel Kiss and the pulpit's elegant proportions were a humble if worthy setting from which to depose the century-old Habsburgs.
The Calvanist College Hungary
Kalvin ter, which adjoins the Voros avenue, is the site of the Calvinist college. This attractive building is also the work of the engineer Pechy, although the fine "interiors are attributed to Karoly Rabel, while the impressive library (apply to the director), constructed in 1827, is the work of a certain Josef Dohanyosi.
Once you have booked into a hotel for the night, it is time to explore the rest of the Voros Avenue. No. 29 is the so-called small Calvinist church, a curious building with a rather ugly tower, constructed in the 1870S over an already existing church of the 172os. The contrast inside is curious: sweets wrapped in dull paper. Nearby is the old County Hall, built in 1912, rich in Jugendstil motifs and afire with the glow of jazzy majolica. There are several taverns along this road which are worth exploring. At night, they are filled with a curious mixture of soldiery, mainly conscripts, and hardened wizened-looking men from the plain wearing jodhpurs and riding boots.
A left turn up Beke utca, past the lovely Baroque church of St Anna, leads to an older part of the town where few houses are above two storeys and crumbling brickwork and overgrown gardens make a pic¬turesque and tranquil scene. Unlike the main boulevards, which meet at right angles, the little streets here meander in a remarkable survival of pre-Baroque planning. Many of the gardens contain the melancholy remains of what were agricultural outhouses and, in some, chickens and other small animals are still kept. Lizt ut, behind the rather eclectic nineteenth-century theatre on Kossuth ut, is typical of these. From here the Var ut returns to the Kalvin Square. To the west of the college, which houses a small museum of eccles¬iastical art, is the more interesting Deri Museum in Deri ter, which has a collection of modern Hungarian art.
Along the Bajcsy Zsilinszky lit is the Bath Hotel (Fiirdo Szallo), which will supply a refreshing bath or some coffee and cakes. The Bajcsy lit leads to the Rakoczi ter, which offers an eccentric ensemble of Baroque buildings and the Town Hall. The restaurant at the corner of the square and Zalka Mate is a good resting point before following the Vorosmarty lit (Madach ter, Galamb lit and Attila lit) to the Calvary church on Szent Tamas hill, a gentle rise at the back of the town, for a final glimpse of the Danube Bend before returning to the capital.
If you hire a car from Budapest Airport,there are two further places of interest nearby which could be knocked off in a couple of hours. Otherwise, there is little lost by setting out to visit them both at leisure on the following day.
Gyor Hungary
The first of these western excursions from Budapest involves a pic¬turesque town which, despite the establishment of several industries around it, still retains a pleasant Baroque centre. The second is a monastery which in size and atmosphere is unrivalled even by the great foundations of Tuscany. Gyor, or Raab as it is known to German speakers, lies eighty miles from Budapest almost exactly half-way between Vienna and the Hun¬garian capital and is a suitable jumping-off point for visiting Lake Balaton.
At first sight, Gyor is rather disappointing. The railway station is a reasonable essay in forties fascist, but the buildings opposite all seem to have been erected in the last ten years. One recovers hope, though, at a large imposing edifice to the right. Grey and white Neo-Baroque, it looks rather like another of Helmer and Fellner's opera houses. In fact, it is the Town Hall, and its size and tower show how important the town was in the nineteenth century.
Almost opposite, a number of parallel roads lead to the old town centre, which is a small square of Baroque and Rococo buildings. The yellow church is sophisticated Baroque in plan and was built by the Carmelites in the 1720S. Its stalls have the ball motif we have seen in Vienna. The rest of the square contains a number of other noteworthy houses of the same period.
From here can be seen the old fortifications of the town, which for several years withstood the Turks. The Alkotmany litca, a pedestrianized street, contains an interesting portal at No. 17. The nearby Szechenyi Square is dominated by the fading blues and whites of the Minorites church erected with great largesse in the 1750S.
The interior possesses some exquisite frescoes which have avoided the restorer's heavy hand. Opposite is a red building with a pleasantly tiled roof, housing a town museum. The Jedlik Anyos utca eventually reaches a Baroque statue marking a road rising towards the cathedral. (The Dunaetel bar just below this monument will provide a glass of refreshing beer before the ascent to this rather Mediterranean-style building.)
The church bears the marks of many styles. Its main entrance has Neo-Classical lotus-leaf columns inspired by Napoleon's Egyptian campaigns, and an even grander 1938 classical door. Inside (when closed, a friendly red-faced gentleman in a house opposite the south entrance will usually open the church up) there are some more frescoes in the nave, a Gothic side chapel of 1404 with Romanesque remains, and a thirteenth-century gold bust of St Ladislaus, one of the most valuable pieces of goldsmith's art in the country.
Gyor Cathedral Hungary
Near the cathedral is a modern but not too offensive hotel (at the time of writing, still to be named) and a Neo-Gothic seminary. The Bishop's Palace, or Abbot's House as it is sometimes referred to, is partly Gothic. A rank garden through the entrance arch offers views of Gyor island, and a small inscription on the garden wall commemorates the year 1809, when, following the only battle fought during the Napoleonic wars on Hungarian soil, the French emperor stayed at Gyor. The island itself can be reached from the square with the Carmelite church, but it offers little of interest except a dramatically ruined synagogue, a Russian barracks and some leafy promenades. Compared with the Hungarian capital, few of the eating establish¬ments here can match the best of Hungarian cuisine.
Pannonhalma Hungary
It is difficult to describe the elation this monastery, set high on the last spur of a range of hills, can evoke. In the spring, with bright blue skies, one might almost be in Tuscany. Only the train, usually packed with Russian soldiers as it approaches the village below, reminds one of the east, as the Neo-Classical facade of the Benedictine's richest establish-ment in Hungary seigneurially rises up over the valley.
The station lies about a mile from the monastery and as the sun sets the walk is suitably invigorating. The foundations of the abbey were laid in 995 by Prince Geza and the church was consecrated in the year 1001. The entrance is between the Neo-Classical wing designed by Josef Engal and Janos Albert Packh in the 1820S and a curious 1940S Italian school block, which adds even more to the Tuscan atmosphere. The main entrance is straight ahead. This opens into a large hall with a staircase-well supported by slender iron columns. Downstairs are some fading but beautiful portraits of Franz Josef and some Benedictine pupils, all with a strong hint of japonisme in the colours, something quite rare in Central Europe.
Up the stairs and towards the tower, however, is a Gothic cloister which in turn has a Romanesque entrance to the church for the monks and a humbler door for the congregation. Here, on a wall just before the entrance, are some of the architect's original elevations for the building, showing that only a part ofPackh's initial ambitious plans were executed, though what there is is splendid enough for a prince.
Inside the chapel, there broods a dark Gothic, refreshingly northern in atmosphere. In keeping with monastic practice, the church is built on three levels, one for the monks, another for the clergy and another for the laity. A crypt below the middle floor is partly Romanesque and partly Gothic. At precisely 19.05, vespers with Gregorian chants can be heard while those who are able to avail themselves of monastic hospitality can look forward to rising with the sun for Lauds at 5.45. These services, with their earnest closely cropped monks whose life-style is rather more austere than that enjoyed by the Benedictines in England, are solemn occasions, as moving as anything in the Romanesque abbeys of France.
A rather overgrown but none the less picturesque botanical garden drops down from behind the monastery while above, the spectacular Neo-Classical library boasts, in addition to a rather dashing statue of the Emperor Francis I, 30,000 volumes.
Pannonhalma is a severe if welcome oasis of calm scholarship. It is still a fee-paying boarding school – which was a remarkable achievement in any communist country and the terrace, with its incomparable views, is as good a place as any in which to contemplate a tour of the rest of Hungary.
Eastern Hungary from Budapest
From Budapest eastwards, the railway and motorway pass some of the flattest and dullest landscape in the world. The Great Central European plain, over which the Mongol hordes swarmed, is a lonely place which has played upon the imagination of travellers to Central Europe for centuries. The Puszta, as this plain is called, so excited the ingenuity of British intelligence during the last war that a plan was seriously considered whereby the 'Fortress Europe' of the Nazis would be set ablaze by a vast fire ignited here by thousands of balloons flown from England laden with incendiaries. Travelling across its seemingly interminable expanse, it seems at times that this would have been a suitable fate for so unexciting a landscape.
Its fifty thousand square kilometres once boasted a unique way of life, dominated by herdsmen who dressed in picturesque attire and looked after thousands of wild horses and cattle. Although, as can be seen in neighbouring Transylvania, this way of life is not completely extinct, to all intents and purposes it died in Hungary after the war, with the country's swift transition to a modern mechanized agricultural economy.
Debrecen Hungary Cheap Car hire for Airports
The best place from which to explore the plain, small villages being rare settlements on the Puszta are never more than a few houses is the interesting city of Debrecen (trains on the eastern railway take four hours from Budapest), whose name is syrtonymous with a delicious sausage known throughout Central Europe as a 'Debreziner'.
Debrecen has always played an important role in Hungary's history and has been a busy trading centre since the Middle Ages. With the establish¬ment of a Calvinist college in 1546, it became the heart of the Hungarian reformation. It was here that the Hungarian patriot Kossuth deposed the Habsburgs in the revolution of 1848. During the winter of 1944-5, Debrecen again became the capital of Hungary, as the last German units in the country were repulsed by the invading Soviet army.
Primarily an agricultural town, Debrecen has suffered a number of unfortunate planning decisions. The need to set up an 'industrial zone' has led to it becoming a far less picturesque place than it once was. Nevertheless, there is much to see, and the oldest parts of the town behind the main boulevards are a remarkably tranquil urban ensemble.
The centre of the inner town is the Voros Hadsereg utja which, in common with most cities of the plain, is as wide as a square. The early nineteenth-century Calvinist church, situated at the north end of the road, can rightly be called the heart of the city. Its yellow mass, with an interesting if rather severe Neo-Classical facade, is fifty-five metres long it is the largest Protestant church in Hungary. It was built to the designs of a military engineer by the name of Mihaly Pechy, but his original plans were adapted by Josef Tallherr, to whom the facade's Ionic order is attributed.
Inside, the three aisles emphasize the rather austere tenets of the Calvinist church. The chancel is the work of Samuel Kiss and the pulpit's elegant proportions were a humble if worthy setting from which to depose the century-old Habsburgs.
The Calvanist College Hungary
Kalvin ter, which adjoins the Voros avenue, is the site of the Calvinist college. This attractive building is also the work of the engineer Pechy, although the fine "interiors are attributed to Karoly Rabel, while the impressive library (apply to the director), constructed in 1827, is the work of a certain Josef Dohanyosi.
Once you have booked into a hotel for the night, it is time to explore the rest of the Voros Avenue. No. 29 is the so-called small Calvinist church, a curious building with a rather ugly tower, constructed in the 1870S over an already existing church of the 172os. The contrast inside is curious: sweets wrapped in dull paper. Nearby is the old County Hall, built in 1912, rich in Jugendstil motifs and afire with the glow of jazzy majolica. There are several taverns along this road which are worth exploring. At night, they are filled with a curious mixture of soldiery, mainly conscripts, and hardened wizened-looking men from the plain wearing jodhpurs and riding boots.
A left turn up Beke utca, past the lovely Baroque church of St Anna, leads to an older part of the town where few houses are above two storeys and crumbling brickwork and overgrown gardens make a pic¬turesque and tranquil scene. Unlike the main boulevards, which meet at right angles, the little streets here meander in a remarkable survival of pre-Baroque planning. Many of the gardens contain the melancholy remains of what were agricultural outhouses and, in some, chickens and other small animals are still kept. Lizt ut, behind the rather eclectic nineteenth-century theatre on Kossuth ut, is typical of these. From here the Var ut returns to the Kalvin Square. To the west of the college, which houses a small museum of eccles¬iastical art, is the more interesting Deri Museum in Deri ter, which has a collection of modern Hungarian art.
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