🇭🇺 Hungary · Budapest and the Danube Bend
Some towns look hand-painted, and Szentendre is one of them. Barely twenty kilometres from the bustle of Budapest, this small, luminous town on the bank of the Danube is the best-loved day trip for Hungarians and visitors alike. Its baroque old town, of cobbled lanes rising and falling between pastel houses, churches with onion towers and flowering courtyards, has a Mediterranean and Balkan air that makes it unlike any other Hungarian town.
That very particular atmosphere has a lovely historical explanation: Szentendre was, for centuries, a refuge for Serbian and other Orthodox communities fleeing the Ottomans, and they left the town their churches, their colours and their sensibility. Later, in the twentieth century, the light and charm of the place drew generations of painters and sculptors, who turned Szentendre into Hungary's great artists' colony. Today the town is full of museums, galleries, craft workshops and ceramics shops.
This guide covers Szentendre with a practical and warm eye: how to get there easily by train from Budapest, what to see in the historic centre, why you should not miss the Skanzen (the great open-air museum of Hungarian vernacular architecture), where to eat by the river and how to string it together with the rest of the Danube Bend. It is one of those places where you want to wander with no fixed plan, camera in hand, letting its corners take you where they will.
Although the area was inhabited from Roman times (the Empire's frontier ran nearby and there was a settlement called Ulcisia Castra), the Szentendre we see today grew above all out of waves of Serbian settlement. After the battle of Mohács (1526) and, above all, at the end of the seventeenth century during the wars against the Ottomans, thousands of Orthodox Serbs, along with Greeks, Dalmatians and other Balkan peoples, fled north and settled here. They were the ones who rebuilt the town in baroque style and raised its many Orthodox churches, giving it that colourful, southern look. Through the eighteenth century, Szentendre prospered as a merchant and wine-growing town. Phylloxera ruined its vineyards at the end of the nineteenth century and many Serbian families returned home, but the town found a new life in the twentieth century when it became an artists' colony: painters and sculptors settled here drawn by its light and its beauty, founding museums and galleries that are still its hallmark. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The historic heart of Hungary: Budapest, born from the union of Buda, Pest and Óbuda over the old Roman Aquincum, and the great bend of the Danube, with Esztergom, cradle of the Christian kingdom, and Visegrád, seat of the Renaissance court of Matthias Corvinus.
Read the history of Budapest and the Danube Bend →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
The history of Szentendre begins long before its famous baroque centre. In antiquity, these banks of the Danube were part of the frontier of the Roman Empire (the 'limes'), and there was a military camp and settlement here called Ulcisia Castra, tied to the defence of the province of Pannonia against the peoples on the other side of the river. The Roman legions left their mark all over the Danube Bend region, of which Szentendre is part.
After the fall of Rome and the passage of various peoples, the area became part of the Kingdom of Hungary that emerged after the arrival of the Magyars and the country's conversion to Christianity around the year 1000. The town's very name, Szentendre — which means 'Saint Andrew' — points to that medieval Christian period and to the dedication of its church. Through the Middle Ages it was a modest settlement in the region near Buda.
The Szentendre we admire today, however, is not medieval but essentially baroque, and its present look was born of a later event: the great migrations of Orthodox peoples who, fleeing the Ottoman advance and then the wars of reconquest, found refuge on these hills on the bank of the Danube.
The great turning point in the history of Szentendre came with the wars against the Ottoman Empire. After the Hungarian defeat at the battle of Mohács (1526) and, above all, during the campaigns of the late seventeenth century in which the Habsburgs drove the Turks out of Hungary, huge waves of Christian people from the Balkans — mostly Orthodox Serbs, but also Greeks, Dalmatians and others — fled north looking for refuge.
The decisive episode was the so-called 'Great Serb Migration' of 1690, when, led by patriarch Arsenije III Čarnojević, thousands of Serbs crossed into Habsburg-ruled territory to escape Ottoman reprisals. Many of them settled in Szentendre, which thus became one of the main centres of the Serbian diaspora in Hungary.
These settlers transformed the town completely. Prosperous merchants, craftsmen and winegrowers, they rebuilt Szentendre in the baroque style then fashionable in central Europe and raised numerous Orthodox churches, whose towers and colours give the town that southern, Balkan air so different from the rest of Hungary. The Serbian community kept its language, its religion and its customs for generations, leaving a stamp that is still the town's most distinctive feature.
The eighteenth century was Szentendre's golden age. Thanks to the drive of its Serbian and Greek merchants, the town prospered as a trading centre and, above all, a wine-growing one. The hills around the town filled with vineyards, and Szentendre wine was exported successfully, generating notable wealth that translated into the building of elegant baroque and rococo houses, sumptuous churches and the carefully laid out main square (Fő tér) that is today the town's postcard.
Out of that prosperity came monuments such as the merchants' cross on Fő tér, put up in 1763 by the Serbian merchants in thanks for being spared the plague, and the numerous Orthodox churches, among them the Belgrade Cathedral, seat of the Serbian Orthodox diocese. The town became a mosaic of communities — Serbs, Greeks, Germans, Hungarians — living side by side and giving it its cosmopolitan, colourful character.
That balance began to break at the end of the nineteenth century. The phylloxera plague, which devastated vineyards across Europe, ruined Szentendre's economic base. Many Serbian families, impoverished, chose to return to their homeland, and the town's population fell. Szentendre entered a period of decline and quiet, keeping, at least, its lovely baroque centre intact, like a beautiful sleeping town on the bank of the Danube.
After decades of dormancy, Szentendre found a new life in the twentieth century thanks to art. From the 1920s onwards, Hungarian painters and sculptors discovered the town's charm — its special light, its colours, its baroque lanes and its peaceful atmosphere on the bank of the Danube — and began to settle here. In 1926 an artists' colony was formally founded (the Szentendrei Művésztelep), which brought together some of the most important names in modern Hungarian painting.
From then on, Szentendre became the artistic capital of Hungary, a kind of bohemian town where art and everyday life mix. Generations of creators set up their studios here, and the town filled with galleries, museums and ateliers. Museums devoted to individual artists appeared, such as the much-loved Margit Kovács Museum, dedicated to the great ceramicist and sculptor whose sensitive works are one of the place's great cultural draws.
That artistic character, added to its baroque beauty and its Serbian heritage, is what defines Szentendre today: an open-air museum town where Orthodox churches, coloured houses, art galleries and ceramics shops sit side by side. Its closeness to Budapest has also made it one of the favourite escapes for Hungarians and foreign visitors alike.
One of the most important cultural landmarks of contemporary Szentendre is the creation of the Hungarian Open-Air Museum (Szabadtéri Néprajzi Múzeum), known as the Skanzen, on the edge of town. Opened in the final decades of the twentieth century, it is the country's largest open-air ethnographic museum and one of the most important of its kind in central Europe.
The Skanzen was created to preserve the vernacular architecture and material culture of rural Hungary, which the advance of modernisation threatened to erase. To that end, peasant houses, churches, barns, mills, workshops and taverns from the country's different historic districts were moved piece by piece — or faithfully rebuilt — and organised into 'regions' that recreate the various Hungarian cultural landscapes of the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
More than a static museum, the Skanzen is a living space: with costumed interpreters, demonstrations of traditional trades, farm animals, seasonal festivals and markets that recreate folk customs. For Szentendre, already famous for its art and its Serbian heritage, the Skanzen added a new dimension: that of guardian of a whole country's rural memory, turning the small Danube town into a complete cultural destination, able to combine the baroque, art, Serbian history and Hungarian ethnography in a single visit.