Hungary

We started our tour of Pecs, Hungary the usual way, at a place of religion.  We have left the countries of the Orthodox Church and entered Roman Catholic lands.  The basilica of the Catholic Bishopry was built in the 8th-9th century atop the original 4th century church and necropolis.  The beautiful grapevined gates were added in 2000.

 Near the church, as well as other places in town, was a statue of Franz Liszt.  Question #1: Who was his son-in-law?

 
An entirely different monument was on the street, a collection of thousands of locks with initials and hearts etched on them and known as Lover’s Locks.  If you are interested in a girl, you engrave her name on the lock as a token of love.

The City Hall was a lovely baroque building with a McDonald’s in the corner and a beautiful  mosaic in the foyer.
 

Lunch was in a pezsgo (champagne) winery.  Our tour took us down five stories to where mold encrusted bottles aged.  The Polish founder so enjoyed champagne in France, he built his own place in Pecs.  Franz Josef was among the honored guests who sample the pezsgo.

The duck leg lunch was excellent as was Anna Lee’s grilled julienne vegetables topped with toasted cheese.

After lunch we went to Kalocsa to see another church where we enjoyed a classical organ concert.

The next day we toured the paired cities of Buda and Pest.  Our bus tour and photo ops of Pest took us to the opera house with its many statues and the square where St. Gabriel hefts his cross. 


 

Then we crossed the Danube to Buda and up the steep hill to see the  Fishermen’s Bastion

 
Matthias Church

Rita, Jerry and Anna Lee left the tour to visit the Great Synagogue, the second largest in the world.  It is a neolog synagogue, similar to orthodox but with the women seated separately downstairs instead of in the balcony.   The congregation uses another synagogue in the winter because this huge one is too difficult to heat.  The architect was a German-Christian who incorporated some church aspects including placing the pulpit for the rabbi to speak more in the middle of the building.  The Ner Tamid, Eternal Light, is an eight-pointed Moorish-style star.

The Jewish population of Budapest was 900,000in the early 20th century.  Six hundred thousand were lost in WWII.  Ten thousand of those died of famine within the enclosure of the ghetto surrounding the synagogue.  Normally a cemetery is not near a synagogue but there was no place to bury the bodies so 2400 were buried in a courtyard next to the shul in 24 shared plots marked with  headstones. 

Overlooking the graves is a monument to those who died.  Actor Bernie Schwartz (aka who?), born of Hungarian Jewish parents, funded a Tree of Life dedicated to those who died.  Near the tree is a stone marker to Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust.

We walked from the shul to the pedestrian street were we enjoyed delicious Hungarian goulash and a pancake stuffed with chicken, our best lunch yet.  Since it was Sunday, one of our desired destinations, the public market, was closed, so no shopping.

Along the shore of the Danube is a woeful memorial to those who were taken to the shore, told to strip, forced into the frigid water and shot.  Empty shoes represent this tragedy.  Unfortunately, the plaque telling what happened leaves out such details as that the vast majority were Jews and that the killers were Nazis.

On our way out of town, Jerry took a nighttime photo of the Parliament Building.