Szentendre

The first well-known settlement here was Ulcisia Castra, a Roman fortress on the Danube frontier. After the Magyar conquest a settlement grew up on the remains of the Roman buildings, and the name Sanctus Andreas — Saint Andrew, Szentendre in Hungarian — first appears in a will of 1146 confirmed by King Géza II. The Ottoman wars almost emptied the town: a 17th-century record found only one family and its servants living here.

During the Great Turkish War Serbs were invited to move to Hungary away from the Ottoman Empire, and in 1690 a mass migration of Serbs reached the Szentendre area. Dalmatian families settled too, on the slope where Dalmát Street still recalls them. The newcomers prospered as merchants, and their wealth paid for the baroque houses, the Orthodox churches, among them the cathedral the settlers from Belgrade built in 1756–63, and the narrow alleys that give the town its character. In the 18th century Serbs were the majority; in the 19th century their numbers declined, and Hungarians became the largest group.

Szentendre stayed a small town of three to four thousand people into the 1870s. The railway from Budapest, opened in 1888, brought it closer to the capital, and from the early 20th century its calm provincial life drew painters; an artists' colony worked in the north of the town from the 1920s, and the Szentendre Artists' Colony was formally founded in 1929. Suburban growth after the 1970s filled the surrounding hillsides with houses, and the town has become one of the best-known day trips from Budapest.

Art is the town's identity. Generations of Hungarian painters have lived here since the early 20th century, and more than two hundred artists, writers, musicians and actors still do. Museums are devoted to individual artists who worked in the town — the painter Béla Czóbel, a member of the avant-garde group The Eight, the ceramic artist Margit Kovács, Károly Ferenczy, the founder of Hungarian modernism, and the couple Imre Ámos and Margit Anna — and the Ferenczy Museum Center runs many of them together. Galleries of contemporary work fill the old houses of the centre.

The Serbian heritage is the other strand. The town keeps several Serbian Orthodox churches, the Belgrade Cathedral being the largest, under the Eparchy of Buda of the Serbian Orthodox Church, and a museum of Serbian church art beside it. The community that built them is now small, but the church towers dominate the skyline and the Serbian church festival is held each August.

Summer brings festivals and concerts to the town. The Hungarian Open-air Museum on the edge of town, the country's largest collection of rebuilt rural buildings, shows folk architecture from the mid-18th to the mid-20th century, and its grounds stood in for a village in the Netflix series The Witcher.

About 28,000 people lived in Szentendre in 2021, a big change from the small town of three to four thousand people that it remained until the 1870s. Large areas around the old centre were added to the town in the late 1970s, and by the early 21st century they had filled with family houses climbing into the surrounding hills.

Szentendre lies within the Budapest agglomeration, linked to the capital by the HÉV railway, and suburban growth has made it in part a green suburb of the capital. Tourism shapes the centre: souvenir shops, restaurants, galleries and museums occupy much of the old town, and summer weekends bring crowds of day visitors. Away from the historic core, life is quieter, in residential streets spreading up hills such as Szarvashegy, where some people live in weekend houses year-round.

The rhythm of the town follows the visitors in the centre and the commuter timetable elsewhere. Growth has strained local infrastructure, which has been slow to keep up with the rising population.

Szentendre's restaurants mostly serve standard Hungarian cooking, and the terraces around Fő tér and the lanes leading off it are where most visitors eat, with the busiest tables on summer weekends when day visitors arrive from Budapest. Lángos, the deep-fried flatbread sold at stalls across Hungary, is the classic snack for day trippers and cyclists arriving along the river from Budapest. It was once made from the last bits of bread dough, baked at the front of a brick or clay oven and eaten hot for breakfast on baking day.

Marzipan has its own museum here: the Szabó marzipan museum and confectionery shows scenes and figures made entirely of marzipan. Pastry shops and cafés around the main square serve cakes in the Hungarian coffee-house tradition.

Wine is the other draw. The National Wine Museum on Bogdányi utca presents the wine regions of Hungary and winemaking tools and offers tastings, and in winter cheap hot wine is sold in the centre.