The Secrets of Pécs

You are standing in the center of Széchenyi Square, and the building before you is lying to you. Its dome says mosque. Its cross says church. Both are telling the truth.

In 1543, Pasha Gazi Qasim the Victorious rode into Pécs and found a medieval church dedicated to St. Bartholomew on this very spot. By 1560, he ordered it razed to its foundations and built the grandest mosque in Ottoman Hungary in its place — a single-domed prayer hall oriented toward Mecca, crowned by a slender minaret. The Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi, visiting in the 1660s, praised its beauty and scenic perch above the square. For over a century, the call to prayer echoed across these rooftops.

Then in 1686, Habsburg-Hungarian forces retook the city, and the Jesuits claimed the mosque. They tore down the minaret in 1766, added an altar and pews, and rededicated it to the Blessed Virgin Mary. But look closely: the prayer niche, the mihrab, still faces Mecca on the southeastern wall. The windows remain arched in Ottoman style. The walls remember even when the congregation has changed.

Every city has a center of gravity, and in Pécs it has never moved. You are standing on Széchenyi Square, and beneath your feet lie the foundations of market stalls from the 1300s. Above you towers the Holy Trinity Column, erected between 1710 and 1714 after a plague devastated the city. The column was a prayer in stone: never again.

Walk south across the square and you will find a fountain that looks like no other. This is the Zsolnay Fountain, donated by the famous porcelain family to the city in 1892. Its surface shimmers with eosin glaze — a technique invented by Vilmos Zsolnay that gives ceramics an iridescent, metallic sheen. Four ox heads spout water from its base, and the pyrogranite body is designed to withstand the elements for centuries.

The buildings framing the square read like a timeline: the Neo-Baroque County Hall, the ornate City Hall, and at the north end, the Ottoman dome you just visited. This is the living room of Pécs.

The four towers rising before you have been watching over Pécs since the 11th century. In 1009, King Stephen I — Hungary's first Christian monarch — founded the diocese of Pécs and commissioned a cathedral on this hilltop. The first building burned in 1064. The second was commissioned by Bishop Maurus and finished by the late 12th century, its Romanesque stone carvings among the finest in Central Europe.

Descend into the crypt and time collapses. The five-nave underground church was built directly above an early Christian shrine, possibly containing the relics of a 4th-century martyr from the Sopianae era. You are walking on Roman bones beneath a medieval floor, inside a building restored to look Romanesque by the Austrian architect Friedrich von Schmidt in the 1880s.

The Ottomans used the cathedral as a stable during their occupation — horses tethered where bishops once knelt. When the Habsburgs liberated the city, they found the stone carvings blackened with campfire soot. Yet the towers endured. They have outlasted every empire that tried to claim them.

The entrance is modest — a glass-walled modern structure at the foot of the Cathedral. But once you descend the stairs, you are standing in the 4th century. Welcome to Sopianae's city of the dead.

The Romans who settled this hillside in the 2nd century AD built their homes and forums above ground, but they buried their most important citizens below it. By the 4th century, Sopianae had become the capital of the province of Pannonia Valeria and one of the most significant early Christian communities north of the Alps. They built two-story tombs: underground burial chambers where the dead rested in brick tombs or stone sarcophagi, and above-ground memorial chapels where the living came to pray.

Sixteen major structures make up the UNESCO World Heritage site, but over five hundred more modest graves cluster around them. The seven-apsed Cella Septichora — a seven-lobed chamber whose shape is almost unique in late Roman provincial architecture — gives the visitor center its name. Stand in its center and you can feel the geometry pulling you in seven directions at once.

The building before you is a masterclass in architectural deception. Its elegant Neo-Renaissance facade, added in the 19th century with a balcony now graced by a 1983 statue of Franz Liszt by sculptor Imre Varga, suggests a refined gentleman's residence. But step inside and the illusion cracks: behind the plaster lie Gothic stone walls from the 12th century.

Bishop György Klimó rebuilt the palace entirely between 1751 and 1770, turning it into the Baroque showpiece you see today. But the most extraordinary feature is underground: a secret passage connects the palace to the Bishop's Cellar, a tunnel that allowed clergy to move unseen during times of siege.

Inside, Flemish tapestries from the era of Empress Maria Theresa hang beside an unlikely collection: antique tobacco pipes and rare books on smoking, accumulated by bishops who apparently believed faith and fine tobacco were not incompatible. The inner garden is one of Pécs's best-kept secrets — a walled courtyard of roses and silence, hidden just meters from the tourist crowds at the Cathedral.

Stand beside this circular stone tower and run your hand along the wall. Feel the narrow arrow slits cut into the masonry. In 1498, General Pál Kinizsi — a legendary Hungarian warrior who, according to folklore, once danced with a dead Ottoman soldier on his shoulders after a battle — visited Pécs and ordered this barbican built as part of the Bishop's Castle defenses.

The barbican is a round gate tower set on a narrow column, and its genius lies in its design: a back gate allowed defenders to attack invaders from the flank as they tried to breach the main entrance. It was the best military engineering the 15th century could offer.

It was not enough. In 1543, the Ottomans took Pécs without a significant fight — the city's defenders, knowing they were outnumbered, opened the gates. The barbican never fired a shot in anger. Today it stands as one of the few surviving medieval fortification structures in Hungary. The word 'barbican' itself comes from Arabic — a final irony for a tower built to keep the Ottoman world at bay.

In 1880, a young pharmacist named Tivadar Kosztka Csontváry was standing behind his counter in a small Hungarian town when, by his own account, a voice told him he would become the greatest painter in the world, surpassing even Raphaël. He was 27 years old and had never picked up a brush. He obeyed the voice.

What followed was one of art history's strangest careers. Csontváry traveled obsessively — to Dalmatia, to Taormina, to Athens, to Lebanon, to Baalbek. His canvases grew enormous. His 'Pilgrimage to the Cedars in Lebanon' (1907) measures two meters tall and vibrates with a mystical intensity that defies any school or movement. His 'Lonely Cedar' has been interpreted by art historians as a self-portrait: a single magnificent tree standing utterly alone in a vast landscape.

He died in 1919, penniless and unknown. His family nearly sold his entire life's work as canvas for covering wagons. A young lawyer named Gedeon Gácser bought the collection and saved it from destruction. Years later, when Picasso saw Csontváry's work at an exhibition, he reportedly locked himself in the gallery and emerged saying he did not know such a great painter existed in this century.

The building at Káptalan utca 3 looks like any other on this cobblestoned street of museums. But in 1906, a boy named Gyz Vásárhelyi was born inside these walls. He would later rename himself Victor Vasarely and become the undisputed father of Op Art — the movement that made geometric forms vibrate, breathe, and trick the eye into seeing motion on a flat surface.

Vasarely left Pécs for Budapest and then Paris, where he spent decades creating works that hung in the world's greatest museums. In 1976, he gave a major collection back to his birth city. Step inside and the walls pulse with zebra-stripe patterns, tessellating cubes, and spheres that seem to bulge from the canvas. Your eyes will argue with your brain.

What makes this museum special is the intimacy. In Paris or New York, you see Vasarely reproduced as corporate logos and airport murals. Here, in the house where he was born, you see the original works at arm's length — the brushstrokes, the imperfections, the human hand behind the optical illusion.

If the Mosque of Pasha Qasim is the Ottoman building Pécs transformed, the Jakovali Hassan Mosque is the one it left alone. Built in the second half of the 16th century, this small, jewel-like mosque retains what no other Ottoman building in Hungary still has: its original minaret.

Step through the entrance on Rákóczi út and you enter a hushed, carpeted prayer hall beneath a single dome. The proportions are perfect — the Ottomans were master engineers of acoustic space, and even a whisper carries from wall to wall. Upstairs in the minaret, the narrow spiral staircase winds 28 meters to the balcony where the muezzin once called the faithful five times a day.

When the Ottomans left Pécs in 1686, most mosques were demolished or converted. The Jakovali Hassan was simply... forgotten. Too small to be worth repurposing, too beautiful to tear down. That benign neglect saved it. Today it functions as a museum, and you can climb the minaret for a view of the city that has not fundamentally changed since the 17th century. The rooftops are still red. The hills are still green. Only the prayers have stopped.

In 1853, Miklós Zsolnay opened a small ceramics workshop in Pécs with a handful of workers. Ten years later, his son Vilmos took over, and what happened next was industrial alchemy. By the turn of the century, Vilmos Zsolnay had transformed the workshop into the largest ceramic factory in the Austro-Hungarian Empire — nearly 700 workers producing tiles, decorative facades, and tableware that graced buildings from Budapest's Parliament to the roof of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna.

The secret weapon was eosin: a glaze technique Vilmos perfected in 1893 that produced an iridescent, metallic finish that changed color depending on the light and angle. He named it after Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn, because the effect reminded him of sunrise. Art Nouveau architects across Europe went mad for it.

When Pécs was named European Capital of Culture in 2010, the city poured 11 billion forints into restoring the old factory grounds. Today the Zsolnay Cultural Quarter sprawls across five hectares with museums, galleries, workshops, a planetarium, outdoor sculptures, and 80 Zsolnay statues scattered among the gardens. The factory that once exported beauty to the world now invites the world back in.