🇭🇺 Hungary · South and west
Sopron is one of the most singular towns in Hungary, and not only for its beautiful medieval centre. It is the town that, in December 1921, voted in a plebiscite to stay in Hungary rather than pass to Austria, and for that reason has since carried the title Civitas Fidelissima, «the most loyal town». Hard against the Austrian border, bilingual and surrounded by vineyards, Sopron looks at once to Hungary and to central Europe, with a foot in each world.
The historic centre, built over Roman Scarbantia, is a maze of cobbled streets, Gothic and baroque houses, churches and towers crowned by its symbol: the 60-metre Fire Tower (Tűztorony), from which the watchmen announced fires, marked the hours and made sure no wine that was not from Sopron came into town. Fő square, with its Holy Trinity column, the Storno and Fabricius house museums, the Goat Church and two medieval synagogues round out a set you can walk unhurriedly.
But Sopron also holds a key place in twentieth-century European history. A few kilometres away, at the border, on 19 August 1989 the Pan-European Picnic was held, when hundreds of East Germans crossed into Austria through a symbolically opened gate: it was one of the first decisive cracks in the Iron Curtain, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. This guide covers the essentials of Sopron — how to get there by train, what to see, what tickets cost in forints, the local wines and Lake Fertő — a town with big history in a manageable size.
The history of Sopron begins as Roman Scarbantia, whose forum lies beneath today's Fő square. In 1277 king Ladislaus IV raised it to a free royal town, and its medieval centre survives over the old walls. Unlike almost the whole of Hungary, it was never occupied by the Ottomans. Its most famous moment came in the twentieth century: after the Treaty of Trianon of 1920, which assigned the region to Austria, a plebiscite held on 14 December 1921 gave Hungary the victory with close to 65% of the votes, and since then Sopron has been the Civitas Fidelissima, «the most loyal town». Decades later, on 19 August 1989, the Pan-European Picnic, at the nearby border, opened a decisive breach in the Iron Curtain. 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 main square of Sopron, under the cobbles tourists walk on today, lies the forum of a Roman town called Scarbantia. That is the origin of Sopron: a settlement founded on the road that linked the Baltic with the Adriatic (the famous «amber road»), at a crossroads that made it, from the start, a place of passage between worlds. The Romans built a forum, baths and walls here, and some of those remains can still be seen in the cellars of the house museums on Fő square.
After the fall of Rome and the passage of various peoples, the Hungarians settled in the region from the ninth century onwards and rebuilt the old Roman walls between the ninth and eleventh centuries. The town, which the Germans would call Ödenburg and the Hungarians Sopron, grew as a frontier stronghold of the kingdom of Hungary, always looking west towards the German world.
The great leap came in 1277, when king Ladislaus IV raised Sopron to the rank of free royal town (szabad királyi város). The title was a reward: the inhabitants had taken in the king's troops and held out against a Bohemian occupation. Being a free royal town meant answering directly to the Crown rather than to a feudal lord, with broad privileges of self-government, trade and justice. Sopron ringed itself with solid walls, built churches and stone houses, and developed a prosperous bourgeoisie of merchants and craftsmen, many of them German-speaking. Much of the historic centre that survives almost intact comes from that medieval period: one of the best-preserved medieval urban ensembles in Hungary.
While most of Hungary fell under Ottoman rule after the catastrophe at Mohács in 1526, Sopron had a different fate. Although the region was devastated by Turkish raids — especially in 1529, during the Ottoman march on Vienna — the town was never permanently occupied by the Ottoman Empire. It stayed on the Habsburg Hungarian side, which let it keep its urban continuity and its population, and explains why its medieval centre survived where so many others vanished.
That frontier position and its strong German bourgeois component made Sopron fertile ground for the Protestant Reformation. Through the sixteenth century, much of the population embraced Lutheranism, and the town became one of the Protestant bastions of western Hungary, with its churches, schools and evangelical community. Because of its importance and its relative safety, Sopron hosted several sessions of the Diet (the parliament) of the kingdom of Hungary, and even coronations and state occasions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A great fire in 1676 destroyed part of the town, which was then rebuilt in the elegant language of the baroque: hence the façades, the palaces and the Holy Trinity column that today give Fő square its stately air. From that rebuilding also comes the distinctive baroque top of the Fire Tower, added in 1681. So, on Roman foundations and a medieval layout, Sopron took on the baroque skin that still defines it, without ever having known minarets or mosques: a rarity on the historical map of Hungary.
The episode that gave Sopron its modern identity came after the First World War, in the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Defeat and the empire's disintegration left Hungary in the hands of the peace treaties, and the Treaty of Trianon of 1920 took away close to two thirds of its historic territory. In that carve-up, the western strip of Hungary, largely inhabited by German-speaking people — including Sopron/Ödenburg and its district — was assigned to the new republic of Austria, first by the Treaty of Saint-Germain (1919) which concerned Austria and confirmed at Trianon as regards Hungary. So the present Austrian state of Burgenland was born.
But the handover was not peaceful. Armed resistance by Hungarian militias broke out in the region, preventing Austria from taking effective possession of the territory, and the tension brought things to the edge of conflict. Italian diplomatic mediation led to the Venice Protocols, which offered an exceptional way out: instead of an automatic transfer, a plebiscite would be held so that the people of Sopron and eight surrounding villages could decide which country they wanted to belong to.
The vote took place on 14 December 1921. The result was clear: around 65% of the votes came out in favour of remaining part of Hungary. Sopron and its surroundings thus stayed Hungarian, on a map that had otherwise been redrawn against the country. The gesture carried enormous symbolic weight in a Hungary humiliated by Trianon: in 1922, the Hungarian Parliament granted the town the honorary title Civitas Fidelissima, «the most loyal town». Since then, the anniversary of the plebiscite has been a local holiday, and the Gate of Loyalty, beneath the Fire Tower, recalls that decision. It is worth telling accurately and without nationalist epic: it was a contested plebiscite, in which a mostly German-speaking community, for economic and sentimental reasons and because of its ties to the rest of the country, opted by a majority for Hungary.
The twentieth century went on being turbulent for Sopron. Its Jewish community, with medieval roots — attested by the two fourteenth-century synagogues on Új street — and rebuilt in modern times, fell victim to the Holocaust: during the German occupation of Hungary in 1944, most of Sopron's Jews were deported and murdered in the Nazi extermination camps. It is one of the deepest wounds in the town's history, one that its surviving synagogues keep alive in memory.
In the last months of the war, Sopron suffered bombing and fighting, and it was taken by the Soviet Red Army on 1 April 1945. With the post-war years came the installation of the communist regime and, above all, a new and dramatic condition: that of a border town of the Eastern bloc. The line separating Hungary from Austria became part of the Iron Curtain, the system of barbed wire, watchtowers and minefields that split Europe in two. Sopron, which for centuries had been a place of passage and trade with the German world, was trapped at the western edge of a closed world, with the border a few kilometres away but impassable.
For four decades, the town's life was marked by that closeness to a guarded, militarised limit. Crossing into neighbouring Austria, so close geographically and culturally, was almost impossible for ordinary citizens. That closed border, however, would become the setting for one of the events that changed the history of Europe.
In the summer of 1989, the Soviet bloc was creaking. In Hungary, a reformist government had begun to dismantle the barbed wire on the border with Austria, and thousands of East German citizens, holidaying at Lake Balaton and around the country, began looking west, hoping for a chance to escape. It was in that context that a group of Hungarian activists, together with figures such as Otto von Habsburg — president of the Paneuropean Union and son of the last Austro-Hungarian emperor — and the reformist politician Imre Pozsgay as patrons, organised a peaceful demonstration for peace at the border near Sopron.
The idea was loaded with symbolism: to open an old border gate near Fertőrákos for three hours so that Hungarian and Austrian pedestrians could cross freely in a gesture of European fraternity. Underneath, the organisers also wanted to gauge the reaction of Moscow and Mikhail Gorbachev's government to an opening of the border. The date was set for 19 August 1989 and announced with leaflets, some of which reached the hands of East Germans.
What happened that day went beyond anything expected. When the wooden gate was opened, hundreds of East German citizens — some 600 to 700 by the estimates — surged towards Austria, towards the free world, and the Hungarian border guards, faced with the rush, decided not to shoot or stop them. It was the largest collective escape since the building of the Berlin Wall, and a decisive breach in the Iron Curtain.
The effect was immediate and set off a chain reaction. Just a few weeks later, on 10 September 1989, Hungary opened its western border completely to East Germans who wanted to leave. The pressure on the East Berlin regime became unsustainable, and on 9 November 1989 the Berlin Wall came down. The Pan-European Picnic went down in history as one of the links that led to German reunification and to the end of communism in Eastern Europe. Today, the Pan-European Picnic Memorial Park, at the border next to Fertőrákos, recalls that day with Miklós Melocco's sculpture «Breakthrough» and a visitor centre; in 2015 it was the first site in Hungary to receive the European Heritage Label. That such an episode of European history should have happened at the gates of Sopron says a great deal about this border town, always straddling two worlds.