🇭🇺 Hungary · South and west
Pécs is one of those cities that surprises you with how much history fits into an old centre you can walk in an afternoon. In southern Hungary, at the foot of the Mecsek hills and a step from the Croatian border, this city of mild weather and almost Mediterranean light stacks up two thousand years of layers: Roman Sopianae, the country's first university, the Ottoman city with its great mosque and the industrial, artistic Pécs of Zsolnay porcelain. It was European Capital of Culture in 2010 and holds one of the most original sets of monuments in Hungary.
Its jewel is the early Christian necropolis, a group of fourth-century burial chambers with Christian frescoes that earned it Unesco World Heritage status. A few metres away, the main square is dominated by the former mosque of Gazi Kasim Pasha, today a Catholic church: it is the largest surviving Ottoman building in the country, with its unmistakable dome. And on the edge of town, the Zsolnay ceramics factory, famous for its eosin glaze with metallic sheen, has been turned into a cultural quarter full of workshops, museums and art spaces.
This guide covers the essentials of Pécs with a practical eye: how to get there by train from Budapest, which monuments not to miss, what tickets cost in forints and how to slip away to the red wine vineyards of Villány, half an hour to the south. Pécs is an ideal destination for anyone who wants to see a Hungary different from the capital, with fewer people, good food and centuries of history round every corner.
The history of Pécs begins as the Roman town of Sopianae, founded in the second century and made capital of the province of Valeria in the fourth, when it flourished as an important Christian centre: from that period come the famous burial chambers of its early Christian necropolis, today a Unesco World Heritage Site. After the arrival of the Magyars, king Saint Stephen founded the diocese in 1009, and in 1367 king Louis I the Great created the first university in Hungary here. In 1543 the town fell under Ottoman rule, which lasted until 1686 and left unique buildings such as the mosque of Gazi Kasim Pasha. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Pécs grew on coal mining and on the Zsolnay ceramics factory, famous for its eosin glaze. It was European Capital of Culture in 2010. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Southern and western Transdanubia: Pécs, a Roman town (Sopianae) with its early Christian necropolis and its Ottoman heritage of mosques and minarets, and Sopron, the "most loyal town", which voted in the 1921 plebiscite to remain Hungarian and which in 1989 saw the Iron Curtain open.
Read the history of South and west →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Beneath the ground of modern Pécs, a few metres from the cathedral, there is a city of the dead almost one thousand seven hundred years old that still astonishes anyone who goes down to see it. These are the burial chambers of Sopianae, the Roman name of Pécs, and they make up one of the most important sets of early Christian art in central Europe.
The Romans founded a settlement here at the beginning of the second century AD, around wine-producing estates that they grouped under the collective name Sopianae. The position was strategic: at a crossroads of Roman Pannonia, sheltered by the Mecsek hills and with a mild climate that favoured farming. In time the town grew until, in the fourth century, it became the capital of the province of Valeria, one of the four into which Diocletian and his successors divided old Pannonia.
It was in that fourth century, as Christianity spread through the Empire after the Edict of Milan in 313, that Sopianae lived its greatest moment as a Christian centre. Its inhabitants built an extraordinary cemetery: a series of underground burial chambers, with memorial chapels above ground level, decorated with high-quality frescoes. Biblical scenes still visible today were painted on their walls: Adam and Eve beside the tree of sin, Daniel in the lions' den, Noah and the ark. Around twenty major monuments and hundreds of more modest graves have been excavated around them, making it one of the densest early Christian necropolises north of the Mediterranean.
The most singular building is the so-called Cella Septichora, a structure with seven apses practically unique in the architecture of the province, which today gives its name to the visitor centre that protects the site. In the year 2000 Unesco inscribed the necropolis on the World Heritage list, recognising it as exceptional evidence of the Christian and funerary culture of the northern Roman provinces. It is, beyond argument, the most valuable treasure in Pécs and the thread that connects the present-day city with its Roman origins.
After the fall of Rome and the invasions that laid waste to Pannonia, the town did not disappear. When the Magyar tribes settled in the Carpathian Basin at the end of the ninth century and founded the Christian kingdom of Hungary around the year 1000, Pécs regained its importance. The first medieval mention, from the year 871, calls it Quinque Basilicae, «five basilicas», after the five old Christian chapels whose materials were reused in the new buildings. From that come both the German name of the city, Fünfkirchen («five churches»), and the local coat of arms.
In 1009, king Saint Stephen, the first Christian monarch of Hungary, founded the diocese of Pécs, which made the city a first-rank ecclesiastical centre. Through the Middle Ages, the bishops of Pécs were powerful figures, and the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul, Romanesque in origin, rose as one of the oldest and most important churches in the kingdom.
The great landmark came in 1367. On 1 September that year, pope Urban V authorised by bull the creation of a studium generale (a university) in Pécs, at the request of king Louis I the Great. So was born the first university in Hungary and the fourth in central Europe, after those of Prague (1348), Kraków (1364) and Vienna (1365). Although the popular story credits the king with the founding, the real driving force was the bishop of Pécs, William of Koppenbach, a cultured man, secret chancellor and trusted diplomat of the monarch. The medieval university, known in Latin as Universitas Quinque Ecclesiarum, ran for several decades before closing towards the end of the fourteenth century, but it left Pécs an indelible mark as the cradle of Hungarian learning.
The fifteenth century brought another luminous figure: Janus Pannonius, bishop of Pécs and one of the great poets of European humanism, who made the city a focus of Renaissance culture. Pécs was thus entering the modern age as a city of churches, books and Latin, with no idea of the upheaval waiting for it.
On 29 August 1526, the Hungarian army was annihilated by the Ottoman Turks at the battle of Mohács, a few kilometres south-east of Pécs. That defeat, one of the greatest catastrophes in Hungarian history, opened the country to Ottoman penetration. Pécs held out a few more years, but in 1543 it fell for good into the hands of sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.
Over the following 143 years, the city was completely transformed. The Ottomans turned it into a genuine Turkish city, with mosques, minarets, baths (hamams), Koranic schools and bazaars. The Christian cathedral was converted into a mosque, and on the ruins of a Gothic church the governor Gazi Kasim Pasha had built, between 1543 and 1546, the great mosque that still dominates the main square. It is the largest surviving Ottoman building in the whole of Hungary: a cubic stone body crowned by a broad dome, with the mihrab facing Mecca still visible inside. The smaller mosque of Yakovali Hasan Pasha was also built, with its minaret, one of the few that survive in the country.
Out of that Ottoman Pécs came a notable chronicler: İbrahim Peçevi, born in the city, whose work documents Ottoman history between 1520 and 1640 and is a key source for understanding the period. The coexistence of the Hungarian population, mostly Christian, with the Ottoman administrators and soldiers shaped two generations of everyday life under the crescent.
The end came in 1686, as part of the great Christian offensive that followed the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683. That year the Habsburg army retook Pécs and brought it, along with the rest of southern Hungary, into the Austrian monarchy. The mosques were Christianised again but, unlike other cities, Pécs kept its Turkish buildings standing. That is why it is today one of the best places in central Europe to see, within a single historic centre, the architectural mark of the Ottoman Empire.
After the reconquest, Pécs was slowly resettled and gradually recovered its role as a regional capital under the Habsburgs. In 1774, bishop György Klimó founded the first public library in Hungary, open to all readers. But the great change of the nineteenth century came from industry: the ground beneath the Mecsek hills was rich in coal, and mining turned Pécs into an important industrial centre, with a railway, factories and a growing working class.
The name that took Pécs to the world, however, was that of a family of ceramicists. In 1853, Miklós Zsolnay founded a modest earthenware factory in the city. His son, Vilmos Zsolnay (1828-1900), joined in 1863 and turned the workshop into an internationally famous manufactory. Vilmos was at once an artist, an inventor and a shrewd businessman: he showed his pieces at the great world's fairs — Vienna 1873, Paris 1878, where he won the Grand Prix — and made them objects of desire for European Art Nouveau taste.
Two innovations sealed the Zsolnay legend. The first was pyrogranite, a ceramic resistant to weather and frost, put into production around 1886, which made it possible to replace costly stone carving on façades and roofs: it decorated emblematic buildings all over Hungary, from the Hungarian Parliament to the Central Market Hall. The second, in 1893, was the eosin glaze, named after Eos, the Greek goddess of dawn: an enamel with iridescent metallic sheen that changes colour with the angle of the light, between greens, golds and purples. Eosin pieces became the unmistakable hallmark of the house.
The Zsolnay manufactory gave Pécs prestige, employment and an artistic identity the city still cultivates. Its fountains, its glazed roofs and the ceramic details scattered around the centre are part of the urban landscape, and the old factory would become, more than a century later, the cultural heart of the city.
The twentieth century was hard on Pécs, as it was on the whole of Hungary. After defeat in the First World War and the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which cut away two thirds of Hungarian territory, the city was left very close to the new border with the kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (the future Yugoslavia). In fact, between 1918 and 1921 Pécs and its mining basin were occupied by Serbian troops, until the city was returned to Hungary in August 1921. That same year, the university expelled from Pressburg (Bratislava) by the new map moved to Pécs, refounding university life in the city after centuries.
The Jewish community of Pécs, prosperous and well integrated — its beautiful synagogue on Kossuth square had been consecrated in 1869 — fell victim to the Holocaust: most of its members were deported and murdered in 1944. It is one of the deepest wounds in the city's recent history, one that the synagogue, today too large for the small community that remains, keeps present in the collective memory.
Pécs was taken by the Soviet Red Army on 29 November 1944, and after the war it lived through the decades of communist rule. Coal mining continued, and to it was added uranium extraction in the Mecsek during the Cold War, a strategic industry that employed thousands of people and that was wound down after the end of communism in 1989. The transition brought, as across the region, the dismantling of heavy industry and the search for a new economic identity.
That reinvention had a high point in 2010, when Pécs was named European Capital of Culture, along with Essen (Germany) and Istanbul (Turkey). The title drove a thorough urban renewal: the historic centre was restored, new cultural spaces were built and, above all, the old Zsolnay factory was transformed into an extensive cultural quarter with museums, workshops and exhibition halls. Pécs, which had already received the Unesco «Cities for Peace» prize in 1998, thus established itself as one of the cultural capitals of southern Hungary: a city where the Romans, the Ottomans, the ceramicists and the university people still coexist, layer upon layer, in plain sight of anyone who walks it.