Three days in Pécs: where the mosque on the main square is the parish church
Two nights in the Hungarian south: a Turkish dome on Széchenyi tér, Roman burial chambers under the pavement, a four towered cathedral and the Zsolnay ceramic works.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Pécs
- Places
- 6 across 3 days
Pécs sits on the southern slope of the Mecsek hills, three hours from Budapest and closer to Croatia than to anywhere else worth naming. It gets more sun and less wind than the rest of the country, the main square has palm trees put out in tubs every summer, and the whole place feels like it has been borrowed from further south. The Germans called it Fünfkirchen, five churches, which undersells it considerably.
The layers here are unusually easy to read for a city this size. The Romans founded Sopianae on this spot and buried their dead in painted chambers that are still under the pavement of the cathedral quarter. Louis the Great founded Hungary's first university in 1367. The Ottomans held the town for a century and a half and left two mosques standing, one of which has been the Catholic parish church since they left and still has Qur'anic script on its walls. Nobody in Pécs finds this remarkable.
It is also a student city, some twenty thousand of them, which keeps the cafes open late and the prices honest. Two nights covers the old town properly with a morning left over for the ceramic factory that made the roof tiles for half the landmark buildings in Hungary.
Highlights
- A sixteenth century Ottoman mosque still in weekly use, as a church
- Painted Roman burial chambers from the fourth century, under a modern glass roof
- A cathedral with four towers and eight hundred years of arguments in it
- The workshop that invented the glaze on every Art Nouveau roof in Hungary
- Cafe tables on a sloping square, in a city with almost no foreign visitors
Where to stay
Pécs, two nights
Stay between Széchenyi tér and the cathedral. That is a five minute walk across, it contains almost everything below, and it means the climb back from dinner is short.
The shape of the stay: the main square and one painter on the first afternoon, the Roman and medieval quarter the next day, and the ceramic works on the way out.
Day by day
Day 1 in Pécs
Széchenyi tér, the mosque, and Csontváry
The square is the whole introduction. It slopes, it is closed to traffic, and the building at the top of it is a domed Ottoman mosque with a cross on the roof, which tells you more about Hungarian history than any museum in the city.
Afterwards, walk two streets north to the museum quarter. Káptalan utca has a collection behind almost every door on it, and the first afternoon is enough for one of them.
- 14:30
The Mosque of Pasha Qasim
ReligiousBuilt in the sixteenth century by Pasha Qasim, using the stones of the Gothic church that stood here first, and Catholic again since the Turks left. Inside, under a plain dome, the mihrab niche and painted Qur'anic verses survive alongside the altar. Shorter hours on Sunday mornings, when Mass takes priority.
- 15:45
Coffee on the square
EatEvery terrace on the upper half of Széchenyi tér faces the dome. None of them is expensive and the one on the corner with the fewest tourists is usually the best cake.
- 16:30
Csontváry Museum
CultureA pharmacist who heard a voice at twenty seven telling him he would outdo Raphael, gave up his trade, walked around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and came back with enormous, luminous, slightly unhinged canvases. Hungary's strangest painter, and this is where nearly all of him hangs.
- 19:30
Dinner in the old town
EatThe streets running west off the square have the pick of it. Book if it is a Friday in term time, because the students book.
With more time: The second Ottoman mosque, out at Kórház tér, kept its minaret and is the more complete building of the two, though it is a fifteen minute walk west and often shut. On the same museum street, the op art collection is worth an hour if the paintings that move when you do are your sort of thing.
Day 2 in Pécs
The Roman burial chambers, the cathedral and the Zsolnay collection
Everything today sits inside four hundred metres of the cathedral square, and the order matters: underground first, while your legs are fresh and the chambers are empty, then up into the daylight.
This corner of the city has been in continuous religious use for about seventeen centuries, which is not a claim many places in central Europe can make with the evidence still in the ground.
- 09:30
Early Christian monuments
HistoricFourth century Christian tombs from Roman Sopianae, painted with Adam and Eve and the Virgin, and the largest surviving burial complex of its kind in the old European provinces. Seven chambers are open under a modern visitor centre, the Cella Septichora, and UNESCO listed since 2000. Ninety minutes, and cool in any weather.
- 11:30
Cathedral
VisitFour corner towers over an eleventh century core, with Gothic, Renaissance and Turkish alterations underneath a heavy 1880s restoration that scraped the building back to an imagined Romanesque. The crypt is the oldest part and the best part. Free to enter the square outside, ticketed inside.
- 13:00
Lunch below the cathedral
EatWalk back down towards Káptalan utca. Weekday lunch menus here are absurdly cheap and the queue of local office workers tells you which door to pick.
- 14:30
Zsolnay Museum
CultureVilmos Zsolnay's factory worked out how to make eosin, an iridescent glaze that shifts from green to gold as you move, and took a Grand Prize in Paris in 1878 with it. Once you have seen a room of it you will recognise the roof tiles on half the good buildings in Hungary.
With more time: Late afternoon, walk up Tettye instead of taking a bus: fifteen minutes uphill puts you among the old wine cellars and vineyards on the slope, with the ruined summer palace of an early sixteenth century bishop at the top and the city laid out below.
Day 3 in Pécs
The Zsolnay works, then the train north
The factory itself is a kilometre and a half east of the centre and has been turned into a quarter of its own: workshops, a planetarium, the family mausoleum, and pyrogranite ornament on everything that would hold still.
Two hours is enough, and it is a fifteen minute taxi or a short bus ride back across town to the station.
- 09:30
Zsolnay Cultural Quarter:
VisitThe old works, reopened as a cultural quarter when Pécs was a European Capital of Culture in 2010. The family and factory history rooms and the mausoleum are the parts to prioritise; the interactive science house is for anyone travelling with children.
- 12:30
To the station
TravelBuses run across the centre and on down to the railway station, and a taxi across town costs less than a sandwich at the platform.
With more time: With a spare day, Villány and its wine cellars are forty minutes south east, the fortress an hour west where Suleiman the Magnificent died besieging it in 1566 is a strange and quiet place, and the hills beyond hold one of Europe's darkest night skies, protected and signposted for stargazing.
Before you go
Getting there and around
Trains run from Budapest Déli and Keleti stations several times a day. The fast ones take about two hours and forty minutes and the route is genuinely worth staying awake for once it drops off the plain; the slow ones take considerably longer and cost little less. Buses go to Népliget in Budapest and are slower and duller. Coming from Croatia, there is a connection over the border at Gyékenyés.
Pécs railway station is a fifteen minute walk south of the centre, uphill on the way back. The old town is small enough to cover on foot and steep enough that you will feel it. City buses are cheap, but buy the ticket at a kiosk rather than from the driver, and validate it: inspectors here are notoriously unmoved by confused foreigners.
What is open when
Most museums close on Mondays and several also on Tuesdays, which catches people out on a two night stay. If you arrive on a Sunday evening, check the two collections you care about before you plan the middle day around them.
The domed church on Széchenyi tér holds Mass, so visiting hours work around the services and are shorter on Sunday mornings. The Roman chambers are underground and cool, which makes them the obvious move on a hot afternoon rather than a wet one.
Eating and drinking
Southern Hungary means paprika used with more restraint than the guidebooks suggest, freshwater fish, and the Villány wine region thirty kilometres away producing the country's best full bodied reds. Ask for a Villányi Portugieser and expect to pay very little for it.
The self service canteens the students eat in serve an entire hot lunch for the price of a coffee in Budapest, and they are not a compromise. The proper restaurants worth booking are up on the hillside above town, where the terraces look back over the roofs.
Most visitors to Hungary see Budapest and go home, and the ones who go further usually go to Lake Balaton. Pécs is the argument against both: a warm, sloping, unhurried city with two thousand years stacked up under one square kilometre, and no queue for any of it.
Take the train down and the train back. The line south is the good scenery, the old town is closed to cars anyway, and the wine here deserves better than a designated driver.
Or make it a longer trip
These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- Is Pécs worth the journey from Budapest?
- If you want a second Hungarian city and you have three days, yes. There are few places in the country where the Roman, Ottoman and Habsburg centuries are all visible within a few hundred metres, and it is not crowded in July, which no longer describes anywhere on the Danube Bend.
- How long does the Roman site take?
- About ninety minutes for the main visitor centre and the chambers below it. The signage is good in English and the chambers are small, so it does not reward hurrying.
- Could I combine Pécs with Croatia?
- Yes, and it is the sensible way to use it. Trains cross the border at Gyékenyés towards Zagreb, and Osijek is a couple of hours by road, which makes Pécs a natural first or last night rather than a detour.
- Two nights or three?
- Two covers the city. A third would go to the wine villages south of the Mecsek rather than to anything else inside town. Copy the trip into the planner and add the night if you want it.