Northern Hungary

The hills of the north were a frontier and a refuge. Stone Age people sheltered in the Bükk's caves, and after the Magyar conquest the region's valleys were held by powerful noble families whose castles, from Diósgyőr to Salgó, still stand in ruins on the ridges. Eger became a bishopric under Stephen I, and the Tokaj hills were planted with vines in the Middle Ages.

When the Ottomans occupied central Hungary, the north became the front line. In 1552 Captain István Dobó and a small garrison, helped by the town's women, held Eger Castle against a far larger Ottoman army, a siege retold in Géza Gárdonyi's novel Egri csillagok that every Hungarian child reads. Eger fell in 1596 and spent almost a century as an Ottoman town, of which its minaret is a reminder. The unoccupied north-east, meanwhile, was a stronghold of the Protestant Reformation and of noble resistance to the Habsburgs, culminating in Ferenc II Rákóczi's War of Independence of 1703–11; the Rákóczi family owned the castle at Sárospatak.

In the 18th century Tokaj's wines were famous at the royal courts of Europe, and the classification of its vineyards began in 1730. In the 19th and 20th centuries coal, iron and steel turned Miskolc, Ózd and Salgótarján into industrial centres. The Trianon border of 1920 cut the region off from Košice, its old market city, and the collapse of heavy industry after 1990 hit the region especially hard.

The north has strong local identities. The Palóc people of Nógrád and Heves, a Hungarian ethnographic group with a distinctive dialect, are known for their costumes, embroidery and village architecture, preserved in Hollókő. Mezőkövesd, on the edge of the plain in Borsod, is the home of Matyó folk art, whose brightly coloured floral embroidery is among the finest Hungarian folk art.

Eger's pride rests on its siege. The town stages historical festivals with costumed re-enactments in the castle, and the story of the defenders drinking red wine, taken by Ottoman soldiers for bull's blood, is the local legend behind the name Egri Bikavér. Sárospatak's Reformed College, one of Hungary's historic Protestant schools, once had the Czech educator Comenius as a teacher.

Wine culture runs through daily life, from the cellar rows cut into the hills to the harvest festivals held across the region in September. Hollókő's Easter celebrations, with folk costume and the custom of sprinkling girls with water, are among the best known in the country. In the industrial towns there is a working-class culture of its own, shaped by mining and the steelworks.

Miskolc, with about 150,000 people, is the region's largest city and one of Hungary's biggest, a university town built around the old Diósgyőr ironworks. Eger has about 50,000 people, and Salgótarján, Gyöngyös, Ózd and Kazincbarcika are the other main towns, while Tokaj itself is a small town of a few thousand.

The economy is mixed. Heavy industry collapsed in the 1990s, and parts of Borsod-Abaúj-Zemplén and Nógrád remain among the poorest areas in Hungary, with high unemployment, emigration and a large Roma population living in segregated settlements. Industry around Miskolc and the chemical works at Kazincbarcika still provide jobs, and tourism and wine sustain Eger, Tokaj and the hill villages.

Days start early, as across rural Hungary, and in wine villages life follows the vineyard calendar, with pruning in winter and the harvest in autumn. Weekends bring Budapest visitors to Eger's cellars and the Mátra's trails.

The north's cooking is hearty upland food. Palócleves, a soup of lamb or mutton, green beans, potatoes and sour cream, is named after the writer Kálmán Mikszáth, called the greatest of the Palóc; game dishes of venison and wild boar come from the Bükk and Mátra forests; and trout from the streams of Szilvásvárad and Lillafüred is served grilled or fried. Village cooking relies on dumplings, cabbage and sour cream, and cottage-cheese pasta, túrós csusza, with crisp bacon, is a popular dish.

Wine is the region's great product. Tokaj makes Tokaji Aszú, a sweet wine made by adding grapes shrivelled by noble rot to a base wine, alongside Szamorodni and dry wines from the Furmint and Hárslevelű grapes; its cellars are lined with a thick black mould that thrives in the damp. Eger is best known for Egri Bikavér, a red blend, and the Mátra region around Gyöngyös is another wine district. The Borsodi brewery, one of Hungary's large beer makers, is based in the county that gives it its name.

Eger is the region's main town for visitors: the castle with its casemates and museum, the neoclassical basilica, the Lyceum with its observatory and camera obscura, the Ottoman minaret, the baroque Minorite Church, the thermal baths, and the cellars of the Valley of the Beautiful Women. North-east of Eger, the Bükk National Park covers beech-forested limestone uplands, with the Szalajka valley and the Lipizzaner stud at Szilvásvárad, while on its far side Miskolc has Diósgyőr Castle and the cave bath at Miskolctapolca. From Miskolc a narrow-gauge railway climbs to Lillafüred, with the Palace Hotel, Lake Hámori and the Szinva waterfall.

Further north, the Aggtelek National Park protects the Baradla cave system, part of the World Heritage Site of the Caves of Aggtelek Karst and Slovak Karst. To the east, the Tokaj wine region, a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape, runs through villages such as Tokaj, Tarcal, Mád and Tolcsva to Sárospatak, with its Rákóczi castle, and Füzér's castle in the Zemplén hills.

In the west, Hollókő's village and castle ruin sit in the Cserhát hills of Nógrád, with Salgó Castle on a volcanic hill near Salgótarján. The Mátra range, with Kékestető, Hungary's highest peak at just over 1,000 metres, rises above Gyöngyös.