Countryside Guides: Pécs

Nestled under the rolling green Mecsek Hills of southwestern Hungary is Pécs, a city famous for bright red and orange tiled rooftops, shiny glazed Zsolnay ceramics, and one slender Ottoman minaret rising just below the horizon.

Flikr Creative Commons

(Top) On the central pedestrian walkway, Király utca, the Szabó Marzipan Museum offers edible replicas of famous Hungarians and Austrians. (Bottom) The only Ottoman minaret left intact in Hungary.

The look and feel of this city of 160,000 is the result of various historical makeovers and cultural influences, many of which are not immediately apparent in the city's buttoned-down Hungarian appearance of today. However, in the last 2,000 years, crosses have been replaced with crescent moons, Celts displaced by Romans in turn replaced by Magyars, and stones from paths laid into baths. Indeed, the most dramatic cultural shift in the city - in Hungary - was the period of Ottoman rule, from 1541 to 1699. After a devastating battle near the grassy village of Mohács in the sixteenth century, generations of Hungarians lived under Ottoman authority.

Today, one of the reasons Pécs was chosen to be the Cultural Capital of Europe for 2010 is because the city boasts the largest collection of Islamic architecture in Hungary, leftovers from a time long ago. The most visible is the Djami of Pasha Gazi Kasim, a former mosque at Széchenyi tér. It takes a little imagination to see past the tourist information booths, ice-cream shops and Hungaricum vendors to visualize how the square used to look years ago, but it is said that it was filled with camels, spices and merchandise from central Asia. Inside the turquoise onion-shaped dome, now a Catholic church, niches point to Mecca and the former face of the city emerges.

Go back further in time with a visit to the old Town Wall behind the impressive neo-Romanesque cathedral at Dóm tér. Nearby is an intact stout stone barbican, built to defend the city against the Ottomans. Down the hill at the end of Ferencesek utcája is the austere Franciscan Church, which was once a mosque, and next to the church are the crumbling ruins of Memi Pasha's Baths. A few streets over a slender minaret rises above the otherwise unremarkable façade of the Djami of Pasha Jakovali Hassan, which is the best-preserved Turkish mosque in Hungary, though nestled next to the Baranya County Hospital.

Equally preserved and also without a large congregation is the Jewish Synagogue on Kossuth tér, which was built in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the spring of 1944, the congregation of 4,000 were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz. Only 700 Jews returned to Pécs after the war. Today, the Jewish population is small and still faces anti-Semitism; meanwhile, the synagogue has been turned into a memorial museum. The city's Tourist Information Office boasts that it was among the first synagogues to be renovated in Hungary after 1989.

Indeed, the city has made an ongoing commitment to the arts. And it is easy to gravitate to the beauty in Pécs and forget anything outside color exists. Wandering is comfortable - many streets are pedestrian-only - and the city could be a poster child for bright, lovely, well-preserved eighteenth-century architecture. Art galleries dot most of the city streets as well as the pedestrian precinct Király utca. On this central corridor, the Marzipan Museum offers edible replicas of famous Hungarians and Austrians, and the attractive Art Nouveau Palatinus Hotel occasionally hosts concert performances. Nearby the the Szerecsen Patika and the National Theater are both decorated with the internationally famous Zsolnay ceramics, while every house on Káptalan utca is home to a museum.

Art stretches outdoors as well. In the square in front of the Djami of Pasha Gazi Kasim is an example of the internationally renowned Zsolnay ceramics: an Art Nouveau eosin-glazed fountain of a bull's head exemplifies the delicate glazes the local company has developed in the past 150 years. To see more, the Zsolnay Museum is on Káptalan utca. Out of town, the Zsolnay factory still produces ceramics today.

Zsolnay is just one of a list of art and artists that Pécs has bestowed upon the world. There are the stark and dizzying contemporary pieces of Victor Vasarely, who is considered the father of optical art. Also see the Amerigo Tot Museum, the surrealist paintings at the Endre Nemes Museum, and ancient regional stone works at the Renaissance Stone Works Museum, which captures the history of imagination. And a visit would be incomplete without a long afternoon at the Csontváry Museum, which boasts an impressive collection of the elegant and strange works by Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry (1853-1919). He was an allegedly mad artist who painted "in pursuit of the path of the sun." The works are striking and his genius is often compared to that of Van Gogh, in fact, Picasso once said of the Hungarian artist: "I did not know there was another great painter in our century besides me."

It is possible Csontváry was influenced by the city's famous "Mediterranean climate" - given Pécs's proximity to the Adriatic Sea - it is known for being heady and warm. Beyond the arts, this climate is palpable: on a hike to the ruins of György Szatmári's Palace at Tettye Park stop to taste the squishy figs hanging from nearby trees, a juicy reminant of the Ottomans, who planted them centuries ago. At the top of the hill is a TV tower, where a café and lookout center offer a panoramic view of sprawling hills and brightly-colored rooftops that hallmark this city of art and mixed, colorful history.

Farther Afield:

Visit Mohács in February for the country's oldest and most bizarre carnival performances: a pagan fertility rite that doubles as an attempt to scare away the rain and "the Turks." The latter part of the celebration is an illusion to the disastrous Battle of Mohács in 1526 that led to the Ottoman occupation of Hungary and is an uncomfortable memory still firmly lodged in the national identity. For year-round recreation, head to Orfű, a village which boasts a number of lakes and offers swimming, boating and lake-side camping. Visit Abaliget to see the caves of limestone stalagmites and the bat museum.

• Email
• Save to My Caboodle