Eger

Eger is in northern Hungary, reasonably near the Slovak border.  It is a lovely little town with its beautifully preserved baroque architecture and is flanked by the Bukk range of hills which are a very popular hiking destination.  It was in Eger that the Hungarian forebears, in 1552,  fended off the Turks for the first time in 170 years of occupation.  The famous Hungarian novel Egri Csillagok (1901) describes the siege and is one of the country's most famous books, required reading in some schools.  I read it before I left Hungary as a child.

This statue is a great looking memorial to the battle against the Turks.

Eger Cathedral.

and another view of it from the 9th floor of the Lyceum which I refer to below.

The Franciscan church.

I am pretty sure this is the Minorite Church  (1773) considered one of the most beautiful baroque buildings in the world.

This is the tiny room in the Lyceum on the ninth floor (the lift is only to the second floor) where the camera obscura- Latin for dark chamber - is demonstrated.  It is an early optical  mechanism for projecting images.
The only other one in Europe is in Edinburgh.

The camera obscura is demonstrated in a totally darkened room illuminated only by the projected image of the city as we can move around the image, scaning all over the city. This is the colourful image of Eger projected on to the table but it is not as clear in the photo as we saw in the actual demonstration.

It is a very interesting sight.  I saw it some 15 years ago when I first visited Eger and I wanted to show it to Andrew.

Our trip to Eger also involved driving around the northern parts of the city between Lillafured and Szilvasvarad, two beautiful little villages that are a springboard for walks and hikes in the Bukk Hills.  This is a photo of the small lake at Lillfured where holidaymakers use rowing boats and canoes.

The large guesthouse at Lillafured just opposite the lake.

We spent the night at Szilvasvarad which was a nice little town and we took the popular narrow-gauge open air  railway into the Szalajka Valley.  Szilvasvarad is also the centre of horse breeding in Hungary with some 250 Lippizaners in local stables, the celebrated white horses bred originally for the Spanish Imperial Riding School in Vienna under the Hapsburgs and are considered the finest riding horses in the world.

Egerszalok in Hungary a smaller version of Pamukkale in Turkey

We travelled to the northern town of Eger and decided to visit Egerszalok 8 km to the south-west which we thought was just another thermal bathing spot.  To our amazement, we found a mini version of Pamukkale in Turkey which is a site visited by thousands of tourists to see the travertines of carbonate minerals.  We loved Pamukkale.

It is quite a sight.  Cascades of very hot water running down from what look like steaming icebergs but are in fact mounds of salt and other mineral deposits.

The mounds are beautifully white and truly look like icebergs.

The hot springs and travertines, or terraces of carbonate minerals left by the flowing water look wonderful in the photo below.  The hotel complex utilising the very hot spring water in the constructed pools is doing great business.

As I noted above, in Pamukkale thousands and thousands come and marvel at these springs, terraces and mounds of salt.  Here in tiny Egerszalok there are many Hungarians and the odd Slovaks and Poles enjoying a similar spectacle but relatively few tourists.  Egerszlok was a totally unexpected and marvellous discovery.

Transylvania (Erdely) Romania

We did a quick trip to Romania, to Transylvania, my mother's birthplace specifically.  I was at first a little confused, thinking she was born in Cluj (Kolozsvar)  but in fact she was born in Satu Mare (Szatmarnemet). We visited both towns and also a national park in between.  My mother was Hungarian and Transylvania, like many other regions around Hungary was lost to Hungary between the first and second world wars, trapping many ethnic Hungarians in foreign lands.  I was astounded to find that every second person in both towns spoke Hungarian.  Cluj University is in fact bi-lingual like Quebec.

We found Romanian architecture quite unique-  very Islam influenced as are some of the churches.  Here is a domestic house.  The style was repeated elsewhere in the region with or without the red tiles on the little cupolas.

A church.

and another church.

St Michaels Church in Cluj with the statue of Matthew Corvinus in front of it.

The city opera house in Cluj.

This rather nice statue of the university founders in Cluj that took our fancy.

The Metropolitan Orthodox Cathedral in Cluj.

The Greek Catholic Church in Satu Mare.

But enough of edifices, here are some photos of nature.  We only had time to go to one of the many national parks in Romania, Apuseni NP  in the mountains.

Tudra Gorge.  This gorge attracts many tourists, mainly from Hungary it seemed.  Hungary's mountains are rather small so they like to go to the Karpathians in Romania and to the Tatras in Slovakia.  We in Australia are rather spoilt for natural beauty, gorges and mountains are all around so we are a little harder to impress.

The ice cave however was an impressive sight to visit.  Here and the photo below are the queues of people descending into the cave.

The cave is at an elevation of 1165 m on the edge of a karst plateau.  The total length of the cave is 700m and its depth reaches 105m below surface.  The air enters in the rather small opening and it has no room to escape, hence the formation of the ice. The ice block has a volume of about 100,000m3, and  a maximum thickness of 22.5m . Its estimated radiocarbon age is 3800 years, being the world's second largest ice block and the oldest one.

The exit from the cave and the ice - this in July.

Belis Lake in the NP was a lovely place to stay.  We were fortunate to find a pension right where I am taking this photo, overlooking the lake.

The view of the lake in the setting sun while we were having dinner looking at this very view.

and to complete the picture here is a view of our first course.  Romanians make fabulous soups.  We did not realise till the end that one of the soups was tripe soup.  It is a national speciality and it was quite delicious.  If you don't like tripe do not order chorba burta.  But then again, be surprised.  Notice the quantity?

Travelling around Hungary

On our return back to Hungary we visited a few smaller towns of note.  First Harkany, almost on the Croatian border of Hungary where the bathing craze is the big drawcard once again.  Here the water is hotter than at Heviz and has the richest sulphuric content in Hungary.  It is supposed to be very therapeutic for swollen joints.  To my great dismay my silver rings turned black.  I rubbed them with toothpaste and restored them to their former shiny glory but I forgot to photograph the black version.

This photo is taken at the strand or swimming pool part of the baths.  All those bodies and the crowd - aren't my Australian viewers grateful for our relatively uncrowded swimming pools?

This is in the thermal part of the pools.  Far less crowded and slightly more expensive than the strand part.

They have great water streams which act as a massage in the water.  A lovely feeling.

We next visited Pecs, also very near the Croatian border and a very pleasant city to visit with an illustrious past and monuments.  The oval shaped inner town is virtually pedestrian-only.  There is a strong Turkish influence in its buildings.

The Mosque Church in Szechenyi Ter in the heart of the old town.

The Mausoleum.

St Peter's Basilica.

On leaving Pecs we came across a number of stork nests on the power poles.  We could not resist capturing them.

These rather large babies are waiting for dinner that their parents dutifully provide.

We next visited Szeged which is very near the Romanian border and is the largest city in the Southern Plain of Hungary.  It is an old city but in 1879 the River Tisza swelled its banks and almost wiped Szeged off the map.  All but 300 houses were destroyed and the city was rebuilt with foreign assistance between 1880 and 1883.  As a result, like Chicago, the city has an architectural uniformity unknown in most other European cities.  The leafy broad avenues that ring the city in an almost perfect circle are named after the European cities that helped bring Szeged back to life.  It is an important university town and students marched here in 1956 before their classmates in Budapest did.

The wonderful Votive Church.

Almost all Hungarian cities have a Szechenyi Square.  This is the one in Szeged.

The compulsory "beautiful building" in every town.

The guide books describe the New Synagogue in Szeged as the most compelling Hungarian Art Nouveau style.  It is the most beautiful Jewish house of worship in Hungary (Budapest Dohany Street Synagogue eat your heart out) and apparently still very much in use.

The cupola, decorated with stars and flowers representing Infinity and Faith, appears to float skywards.

It is the most beautiful synagogue I have seen.

Plitvicka Lakes National Park

With a surface area of 294.82 sq kms, the Plitvicka Lakes National Park is the largest of Croatia's 8 national parks.  It is an amazing place to visit and in 1979 the NP was included in the Unesco list of world heritage sites with good reason.  The park represents a phenomenon of karst hydrography and has the same tufa as at Lawn Hill in Queensland Australia.

This is a map of the NP with all its lakes.  Getting around is by a combination of lots of walking, taking a boat and also taking a bus and following a set out route.  But one can vary the route and wander around as Andrew did after our combined trip.  He did and extra 21 kms on his own, worrying me to death by staying out until 6.00pm.

This shot is taken on the biggest of the lakes where we travelled across by boat.

The lakes are best known for their cascades and the ongoing biodynamic process of tufa formation under specific ecological and hydrological conditions. Tufa or travertine is a porous carbonate rock formed by the sedimentation of calcium carbonate from water.  Lawn Hill has much smaller cascades than these giant ones.

There is hardly any need for commentary for these photographs.  Just enjoy the beauty as we did.

The tufa builds barriers, sills and other forms in karst rivers and streams.  This travertine formation is especially prominent here at these lake waterfalls and is constant, happening while the over 1 million per year visitors to the park are enjoying their walks through the park.  This travertine formation creates the impression that the Plitvicka Lakes are never the same from one day to the next.

It was a wonderful way to end our very brief visit to Croatia.