Visiting Pecs, Hungary

Pecs is a little art-oriented university town of 160,000 people. It has one of the oldest universities in Europe, a (they claim) famous pottery factory, and lots of famous (in Hungary) artists, writers and musicians. And a truly grand basilica. The basilica is enormous -- what you might expect for a city like London or Paris, not a town of 160,000. Awesome.

We also visited a striking stone church in a building that used to be a mosque when the Turks were in charge in the 1500s. The Turks built it out of the remains of a Medieval Christian church that they had destroyed, so some of the stones have a really distant provenance. It has the typical onion dome, some elegant prayer niches, a few Arabic inscriptions, and lots of gold-accented murals of Jesus and various martyrs and heathens being beheaded.

Pecs is also the home of an artist I. is fond of, Vasarely, who started the Op Art movement. I. can elaborate on this more since I don’t know anything else about it, but we went to a fun Op Art museum with lots of original stuff.

And another museum with an eerie installation art thing. (Sorry for inept vocabulary for art.) We were the only visitors, so the woman we paid at the reception desk gave us a tour. She told us in almost-slow-enough, almost-simple-enough Hungarian who the figures were and what it was all about. I got about 30% of what she said (or at least deluded myself I did) and magically managed to understand her questions when she asked them, so she probably thought we understood more. (Or she was too tactful to let us see that we answered her simple questions with completely unrelated answers.) Anyway, this installation thing gets a whole building of its own, a dim high-ceilinged absolutely silent edifice.

Inside is a street. The work is called "Street" in Hungarian. We read that it is the artist's description of how she felt when her lover left her. Several small buildings front onto this little street, each with one or more windows or doors partly open. You can see a figure from the artist’s life through each open window or door. A lot of the figures are Hungarian writers or actors or actresses. One is Marx. One is the artist's mother. They are all very white-skinned and clothed entirely in white. The only color is their hair, which is made out of spun metal. One woman has bright brass hair. Literally. I think at least some of them were cast from real people, because except for their unnatural whiteness they look convincingly real. Standing at the end of this silent street with all these white cold figures looking out at you windows and doors is really genuinely eerie. We had a great time in there, even though I thought it was kind of creepy. It is certainly the most effective, emotion-provoking installation art thing I've ever seen. Not that I've seen many.

The first night we stayed in Hotel Palatinus, which was on all the maps and tourist brochures. We saw it from the main pedestrian street-- a heavily embellished, yellow and white hotel with balconies all around, flowers everywhere, and wonderful Deco murals inside. The lobby was all tile and marble and gold gilt. The room itself was dim and hot and smelly. We opened the window and sealed off the bathroom and after awhile it was all right, but barely. The staff seemed to resent our taking up their time.

The second night we spent in a cute little place with friendly staff and a hot, odor-free room for less than half the price. They were full the next night, so then we moved to yet another place where the room was small and clean and the bathroom looked immaculate, smelled horrendous. Hungarian toilets, like so many around the world, are designed to separate you from the sewers only visually.

Each night we found a new outdoor cafe on a pedestrian street to sit at. From sundown on we sat outside and drank hot chocolate, cheap wine, or espresso and watched the foot traffic on the cobblestones. We read cheap American novels and talked or just sat. It was quite lovely. Two nights around 8 o'clock we noticed a mysterious sulfurous smell. It hung around for a couple hours and then disappeared. We have no idea what it was.

There was a skinny middle-aged guy selling pretzels from a pushcart on one of the pedestrian streets with a really strange voice. I called him the Pretzel Demon. He had an incredibly creepy, totally unintelligible voice. It sounded completely humanly impossible -- like the results of a Vocoder, not a person. After the first night, we always avoided his street when he was selling his pretzels. Another Pecs mystery.


On our last full day in Pecs, we took a packed local bus up into the hills to some lakes. We had read that there were some special summer festivals up there with folk dancing, local bands, and lots of people. After our 40 minute, 18 km trip up the hills, we found the lakes by getting off the bus when everybody else did. We trailed along after the crowd to an area where you paid to get behind a fence. So we paid to go behind the fence ($1 each) not really knowing what we would find. We found a nice lake with a few acres of shoreline fenced off. The few fenced off acres were filled with THOUSANDS of Hungarians. Families, cruising teenagers, old folks, happy naked babies. Except the happy naked babies, all the men wore Speedoes and all the women wore bikinis. Sunning, running, cruising, playing water soccer, eating. Sort of in the center there's a huge many-times-Olympic-sized swimming pool so crammed with children you couldn't swim a single stroke without running into one. There were people lined up at the snack bars, which had only Hungarian food -- fried bread, sausages, Hungarian crepes, and local beer and wine.

Most people completely ignored the lake itself. We didn't see anyone swimming. A little old lady had a few boats to rent, but that seemed to be the only use of the lake water. And people seemed to be having a great time. For the first time in a crowd since we got here, were heard only Hungarian -- no English or German.

We decided to rent a boat. The boats were booked for awhile, so the best bet for us seemed to be to rent 2 Crocodile boats -- floating mini-boats in bright plastic toy colors for 1 person each. We had a few minutes, so we wandered off to get some sun tan lotion. When we came back at the pre-agreed time (all negotiated stricly in Hungarian, but we were pretty confident we all understood each other) our 2nd boat wasn't there yet. Our little old lady told us it would be a couple more minutes. After 10 more minutes we realized that the cute little boat floating in the middle of the lake with the guy sound asleep in it was probably "ours." We waited a few more minutes and then decided not to wait for him to wake up from his nice rest in our boat.

After awhile we wandered around the lake past the pay area, where people had what we thought were probably their summer homes -- teeny homes with sunflowers and grape vines and homemade docks with rotting dinghys tied up to them. I think it looked like a lovely place for a little summer home and a lovely way to spend a summer with your family.