Hungary
Hungary is a heart-stealer; it will lure you back again and again to sample its rich wines, lounge in its thermal spas, gaze at its birdlife and make one more attempt to master its hermetic language. It has all the luxury of Western Europe with a Magyar twist and at half the cost.Its graceful capital Budapest has a lively arts, caf and music scene, and is host to a range of cultural and sporting festivals. In the countryside you’ll
find majestic plains, resort-lined lakes, Baroque towns, horse markets and rustic villages.
General
Though it can be pretty wet in May and June, spring is just glorious in Hungary. The Hungarian summer is warm, sunny and unusually long, but the resorts are very crowded in late July and August. Like Paris and Rome, Budapest comes to a halt in August (called ‘the cucumber-growing season’ here because that’s about the only thing happening).
Autumn is beautiful, particularly in the hills around Budapest and in the Northern Uplands. November is one of the rainiest months of the year, however. Winter is cold, often bleak and museums and other tourist sights are often closed. Animal lovers might also want to skip this season: many of the women are draped in furry dead things throughout the winter.
Events
Hungary’s major celebration is the Budapest Spring Festival (March), a two-week cultural extravaganza of local and international performances, conferences and exhibitions. Other important events include: the Budapest Film Festival (February), which premieres new Hungarian films; Bus j r s (Moh s; February also), the nation’s top Mardi Gras; Sopron Festival Weeks (Sopron; June/July), showcasing ancient music and dance performances; the Folk Arts Festival (Nagyk ll August), one of the biggest and best events of the year; and Jazz Days (Debrecen; September), which is Hungary’s top jazz festival.
Off the Beaten Track
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Hortobágy National Park
This huge national park offers some of the best bird-watching in Europe: over 310 species have been spotted here in the past 20 years. Among the fragile wetlands, marshes and saline grasslands are many types of herons, egrets, spoonbills, storks, warblers and eagles. The park is also home to the great bustard, one of the world’s largest birds, which stands a metre high and weighs in at 20kg. A visit to the best parts of the park requires a guide, and travel must be done by horse, carriage or on foot. The wildlife preserve is about 40km west of Debrecen, in the Great Plain.
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Máriapécs
The tiny town of M riap cs is an important place of pilgrimage. Devotees are drawn to a gorgeous Greek Catholic church, which houses the Weeping Black Madonna, an enormous and unbelievably ornate iconostasis that now takes pride of place above the altar. Even Pope John Paul II hurried here in 1991 to pay homage to the miraculous image, which is why the church is in good condition today. What was surely known to him - and not to others - is that this icon is not the original, but a 19th-century copy. The real one is kept in St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna.
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Pannonhalma Abbey
Founded by Benedictine monks almost 1000 years ago, Pannonhalma Abbey has been destroyed and rebuilt many times and is now a crazy quilt of Turkish, Romanesque and Gothic architectural styles. The interior is beautiful, despite the butchery, and includes a neoclassical library containing some
300,000 volumes (making it the largest private library in Hungary); historical archives holding some of the earliest surviving examples of written Hungarian; a gallery with works by Dutch, Italian and Austrian masters from the 16th to 18th centuries; and, above the red-marble arched doorway, a fresco depicting the patron, St Martin of Tours. Look down to the right near St Martin and you’ll see, written in Latin, perhaps the oldest graffiti in Hungary: ‘Benedict Padary was here in 1578.’ Pannonhalma is a
working monastery, and must be visited with a guide. It is in the tranquil village of Pannonhalma, 18km southeast of Gyor, in Western Transdanubia.