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Hungary For Furmeets
Nov. 29th, 2012 10:21 pmAs we had seen the main sights of Budapest on our last visit three years ago, we opted to go out of town and explore a little bit of rural Hungary. As we only had an afternoon in which to do this, we opted for the delightful Baroque town of Szentendre, some 19km to the north. Even though it is barely out of the capital city, this picturesque settlement is a million miles from the bustle of Budapest and is a popular haunt with tourists and day-trippers. Fortunately, in November, tourists were few and far between aside from a party of Ukrainians who were following a man around the cobbled streets with a little plastic flag.
Szentendre, which translates as St Andrew's, is on the Danube Bend, a picturesque valley which follows the river as it lurches from travelling east to south before it enters Budapest. Many nobles built castles here while the settlements became flourishing merchant towns due to the proximity of the river. Sadly we did not have enough time to explore beyond the confines of the town, known as the gateway to this region. Getting there was easy enough on the S-Bahn number 5 straight from Budapest City Centre. The train is an extension of the metro system, a little delapidated but reliable enough as it worms its way through Budapest's northern suburbs, out into the countryside, through Pomaz and eventually to Szentendre.
The S-Bahn station is a short walk from the centre of the town and as soon as you cross the river (which is little more than a concrete gulley with a trickle in it, in all honesty), you are transported back to a picture postcard world. The first building you see is the impressive orange facade of the Pozarevacka Church, the first evidence of a Serbian presence in the region. This area was largely founded by Serbs who migrated north once Hungary capitured what is present day Belgrade from the Turks. Heading deeper into the town past Baroque shop fronts and restaurants, you end up in Fo Ter, the main square, where stands the Plague Cross, a charming little monument built to thank God for sparing the town from a plague outbreak in 1763. The square is dominated by the towering presence of the Blagovestenska Church, another Serbian building. To the left and towering over the town is the Peter-Paul Church, a neat yellow and white Baroque church built in 1708 whose peeling of bells only added to the Olde Worlde atmosphere of the place. Coupled with the autumnal fog rolling off the adjacent River Danube and as the sun went down and the air turned cold, the whole affair was rather magical.
We spent the next hour or so getting lost in the charming alleyways and boulevards which radiate out from Fo Ter, checking out such delights as the Kovacs Blue Dye Shop, where everything, and I mean everything, is coloured in a rich blue hue, a traditional folk style. Sadly, The Red Lion pub was closed but we did manage to sneak into a rather deserted wine bar later on, where the waiter, who had no one else to talk to, spent a lot of the time speaking to us about the huge range of Hungarian wines he had on offer. We tried a couple, particularly the reds, and they were was velvety and as moreish as the ones we had had the previous night in the restaurant. This was a better stop than The Wine Museum with its waiters loitering outside, which the guidebook told us was pretty much a ruse to get people into the adjacent restaurant. I don't know how true that is.
Szentendre probably has the greatest number of museums and galleries of any place I have ever been - there must be at least 20 institutions dedicated to the arts. We decided to go to the Music Box Museum, which is essentially a private collection of 18th, 19th and early 20th century musical instruments housed above a charming couple's chinzy gift shop. The gentleman who showed us around knew little English and struggled to walk as he had a cane, but he had such a passion for these delightful historical pieces that it was difficult not to become infected by it. Indeed, this was one of the best museums I have ever been to, despite it's dimunitive size. Certainly, it's small, but we were given demonstrations in how these engineering marvels, which all work on simple mechanics, worked and the sweet sounds they made were gloriously heartwarming. Most of them operated on pins striking hammers, forcing notes to be played, and the sheer craftsmanship and care that had gone into these items only made the music sound even sweeter. As well as the old gramophones, there was an orchestrion, still in working order as well as the oldest box they have, manufactured in 1760, through which a beautifully decorated little bird pops up to play its birdsong, rotating on a little wheel as it did so. Amongst the other items I can remember, there was a telephone which turned into a musical bar, replete with shot glasses and a little boy picking up a young girl to the beat of a drum. Many of the pieces were mobile music boxes, huge affairs which were pedelled from town to town to entertain locals. For 800 forints (£2.50) this was a fascinating walk into the past and the pictures on the walls of these machines in operation only added to the allure and special nature of these pokey two rooms above a shop in Hungary.
Our second museum of the day was the Marzipan Museum, which was adjoined to a shop which makes the sticky stuff. You could see an expert marzipan maker making toads out of marzipan but the real draw was seeing the huge marizpan sculptures on the first floor. This place was pretty much the Madame Toussard's of marzipan, with a life-size marzipan Princess Diana and Michael Jackson greeting you at the entrance. There are also many Disney tales depicted in marzipan, such as 101 Dalmations, as well as a load of fairy tales and other heartwarming scenes. Dogs, rabbits, foxes, frogs - it was also a cornicopia of sweet animals, made sweeter by the sweet substance from which they were made. The family of four puppies and mother in a dog basket was probably my favourite marzipan sculpture but the marzipan portraits of former Hungarian rulers, the marizpan plates on the walls and the huge marzipan replica of the Hungarian Parliament should also be mentioned, along with the fact that this paragraph probably contains the word marzipan more times than any other paragraph in the history of writing. We could have bought a sweet little marzipan fox to take home with us but we would have felt guilty about eating him as he looked so happy. Well, I would have felt guilty anyway.
Feeling a need for a little higher culture, we then headed to the wine tasting place, previously mentioned, before checking out the Margit Kovacs Museum. Kovacs is widely considered to be Hungary's greatest ceramicist and sculptor, and her art deals with elements of myth, lore, religion, love and motherhood. There is a strong devout adherance to God in much of her work, with a melancholy air throughout. The highlight was undoubtedly the tacticle room, where you could touch and feel some of her work. This gave you a greater appreciation of the skill and detail that had gone into creating the pieces, with a rotating platform allowing you to analyse the form from every angle. This room was actually an initiative to promote love for the art amongst blind people, allowing them the tactile experience of art as a route to its appreciation. It was a brilliant idea and a very powerful message, and I feel it's a shame that not more places do not have similar ventures.
Back in the street and now in the dark, we headed to the Rab Raby Restaurant, opposite the wine place aforementioned, for some Hungarian beef stew and gnocchi. The restaurant had an odd eclectic decour, with wooden thrones similar to those of a Medieval castle with Victorian-era metal advertisements for motor oil and the like adorning the walls. It was all rather strange really, as was proffering wine from a jug, but the meal was suitably tasty and we were soon back on the S-Bahn and heading back into Budapest had we had some furs to meet in our favourite bar in Budapest.
Around the corner from the Roman Ampthitheatre, or at least what remains of it, which is essentially two large arches, there is an underground bar that we had visited on our last visit. It is Ralesk's favourite hangout as it's not particularly busy and, when it is, it is usually populated by students. Aside from the lack of smoking due to Hungary's implementation of a smoking ban, the place was exactly as we remembered it, serving exactly the same type of beer with the same moustachoed eccentric man behind the bar. Granted, they had taken away the gorgeous bread-lard-paprika-onion snack they once served but after a few beers amongst good company, this didn't really matter. The football was on the television, the barman was doing his accounts, we were drinking bottled Dreher and having a good laugh about a large range of topics. Then we started on politics and it got serious, but it was interesting nonetheless. This is the reason, above all others, why we need to visit Budapest more often and with the price of a trip similar to that of an excursion to London, the opportunity is there to attend more Hungarian furmeets in the future.
Furs fragmented as the evening wore on, until there were only four of us remaining at closing time. This was 10pm so we headed towards the tram stop and arguably the worst bar in Budapest. Still, this place has an excellent takeaway adjacent to it - where we got a rather nice cheeseburger, which is written sajtburger and pronounced shite burger in Hungarian - before we were tempted with another beer (a standard pilsner called Soproni) at elevated prices. This is a 24 hour bar and is nothing more than a heated shack on a pavement really, but we were the only ones there and it has become something of a ritual to call in here after our trip to the fantastic bar before. However, as we needed to rest, we soon caught the tram from the stop nearby, with Ralesk telling us where to get off and pointing us in the general direction of our hotel. To be fair, he was right as after 15 minutes of walking, which included taking in a beautifully gothic castle just behind Heroes Square, we were back to the hotel and headed to bed.
Szentendre, which translates as St Andrew's, is on the Danube Bend, a picturesque valley which follows the river as it lurches from travelling east to south before it enters Budapest. Many nobles built castles here while the settlements became flourishing merchant towns due to the proximity of the river. Sadly we did not have enough time to explore beyond the confines of the town, known as the gateway to this region. Getting there was easy enough on the S-Bahn number 5 straight from Budapest City Centre. The train is an extension of the metro system, a little delapidated but reliable enough as it worms its way through Budapest's northern suburbs, out into the countryside, through Pomaz and eventually to Szentendre.
The S-Bahn station is a short walk from the centre of the town and as soon as you cross the river (which is little more than a concrete gulley with a trickle in it, in all honesty), you are transported back to a picture postcard world. The first building you see is the impressive orange facade of the Pozarevacka Church, the first evidence of a Serbian presence in the region. This area was largely founded by Serbs who migrated north once Hungary capitured what is present day Belgrade from the Turks. Heading deeper into the town past Baroque shop fronts and restaurants, you end up in Fo Ter, the main square, where stands the Plague Cross, a charming little monument built to thank God for sparing the town from a plague outbreak in 1763. The square is dominated by the towering presence of the Blagovestenska Church, another Serbian building. To the left and towering over the town is the Peter-Paul Church, a neat yellow and white Baroque church built in 1708 whose peeling of bells only added to the Olde Worlde atmosphere of the place. Coupled with the autumnal fog rolling off the adjacent River Danube and as the sun went down and the air turned cold, the whole affair was rather magical.
We spent the next hour or so getting lost in the charming alleyways and boulevards which radiate out from Fo Ter, checking out such delights as the Kovacs Blue Dye Shop, where everything, and I mean everything, is coloured in a rich blue hue, a traditional folk style. Sadly, The Red Lion pub was closed but we did manage to sneak into a rather deserted wine bar later on, where the waiter, who had no one else to talk to, spent a lot of the time speaking to us about the huge range of Hungarian wines he had on offer. We tried a couple, particularly the reds, and they were was velvety and as moreish as the ones we had had the previous night in the restaurant. This was a better stop than The Wine Museum with its waiters loitering outside, which the guidebook told us was pretty much a ruse to get people into the adjacent restaurant. I don't know how true that is.
Szentendre probably has the greatest number of museums and galleries of any place I have ever been - there must be at least 20 institutions dedicated to the arts. We decided to go to the Music Box Museum, which is essentially a private collection of 18th, 19th and early 20th century musical instruments housed above a charming couple's chinzy gift shop. The gentleman who showed us around knew little English and struggled to walk as he had a cane, but he had such a passion for these delightful historical pieces that it was difficult not to become infected by it. Indeed, this was one of the best museums I have ever been to, despite it's dimunitive size. Certainly, it's small, but we were given demonstrations in how these engineering marvels, which all work on simple mechanics, worked and the sweet sounds they made were gloriously heartwarming. Most of them operated on pins striking hammers, forcing notes to be played, and the sheer craftsmanship and care that had gone into these items only made the music sound even sweeter. As well as the old gramophones, there was an orchestrion, still in working order as well as the oldest box they have, manufactured in 1760, through which a beautifully decorated little bird pops up to play its birdsong, rotating on a little wheel as it did so. Amongst the other items I can remember, there was a telephone which turned into a musical bar, replete with shot glasses and a little boy picking up a young girl to the beat of a drum. Many of the pieces were mobile music boxes, huge affairs which were pedelled from town to town to entertain locals. For 800 forints (£2.50) this was a fascinating walk into the past and the pictures on the walls of these machines in operation only added to the allure and special nature of these pokey two rooms above a shop in Hungary.
Our second museum of the day was the Marzipan Museum, which was adjoined to a shop which makes the sticky stuff. You could see an expert marzipan maker making toads out of marzipan but the real draw was seeing the huge marizpan sculptures on the first floor. This place was pretty much the Madame Toussard's of marzipan, with a life-size marzipan Princess Diana and Michael Jackson greeting you at the entrance. There are also many Disney tales depicted in marzipan, such as 101 Dalmations, as well as a load of fairy tales and other heartwarming scenes. Dogs, rabbits, foxes, frogs - it was also a cornicopia of sweet animals, made sweeter by the sweet substance from which they were made. The family of four puppies and mother in a dog basket was probably my favourite marzipan sculpture but the marzipan portraits of former Hungarian rulers, the marizpan plates on the walls and the huge marzipan replica of the Hungarian Parliament should also be mentioned, along with the fact that this paragraph probably contains the word marzipan more times than any other paragraph in the history of writing. We could have bought a sweet little marzipan fox to take home with us but we would have felt guilty about eating him as he looked so happy. Well, I would have felt guilty anyway.
Feeling a need for a little higher culture, we then headed to the wine tasting place, previously mentioned, before checking out the Margit Kovacs Museum. Kovacs is widely considered to be Hungary's greatest ceramicist and sculptor, and her art deals with elements of myth, lore, religion, love and motherhood. There is a strong devout adherance to God in much of her work, with a melancholy air throughout. The highlight was undoubtedly the tacticle room, where you could touch and feel some of her work. This gave you a greater appreciation of the skill and detail that had gone into creating the pieces, with a rotating platform allowing you to analyse the form from every angle. This room was actually an initiative to promote love for the art amongst blind people, allowing them the tactile experience of art as a route to its appreciation. It was a brilliant idea and a very powerful message, and I feel it's a shame that not more places do not have similar ventures.
Back in the street and now in the dark, we headed to the Rab Raby Restaurant, opposite the wine place aforementioned, for some Hungarian beef stew and gnocchi. The restaurant had an odd eclectic decour, with wooden thrones similar to those of a Medieval castle with Victorian-era metal advertisements for motor oil and the like adorning the walls. It was all rather strange really, as was proffering wine from a jug, but the meal was suitably tasty and we were soon back on the S-Bahn and heading back into Budapest had we had some furs to meet in our favourite bar in Budapest.
Around the corner from the Roman Ampthitheatre, or at least what remains of it, which is essentially two large arches, there is an underground bar that we had visited on our last visit. It is Ralesk's favourite hangout as it's not particularly busy and, when it is, it is usually populated by students. Aside from the lack of smoking due to Hungary's implementation of a smoking ban, the place was exactly as we remembered it, serving exactly the same type of beer with the same moustachoed eccentric man behind the bar. Granted, they had taken away the gorgeous bread-lard-paprika-onion snack they once served but after a few beers amongst good company, this didn't really matter. The football was on the television, the barman was doing his accounts, we were drinking bottled Dreher and having a good laugh about a large range of topics. Then we started on politics and it got serious, but it was interesting nonetheless. This is the reason, above all others, why we need to visit Budapest more often and with the price of a trip similar to that of an excursion to London, the opportunity is there to attend more Hungarian furmeets in the future.
Furs fragmented as the evening wore on, until there were only four of us remaining at closing time. This was 10pm so we headed towards the tram stop and arguably the worst bar in Budapest. Still, this place has an excellent takeaway adjacent to it - where we got a rather nice cheeseburger, which is written sajtburger and pronounced shite burger in Hungarian - before we were tempted with another beer (a standard pilsner called Soproni) at elevated prices. This is a 24 hour bar and is nothing more than a heated shack on a pavement really, but we were the only ones there and it has become something of a ritual to call in here after our trip to the fantastic bar before. However, as we needed to rest, we soon caught the tram from the stop nearby, with Ralesk telling us where to get off and pointing us in the general direction of our hotel. To be fair, he was right as after 15 minutes of walking, which included taking in a beautifully gothic castle just behind Heroes Square, we were back to the hotel and headed to bed.
