A Trip to Szentendre
 (Click on any photo for a detailed look.)
(Szentendre is a village 15 miles up the Danube from Budapest)
  

This is a community that was founded on an old Roman settlement. In the 1700s, Serbians fleeing the Turks settled there and became prosperous wine merchants and shipbuilders.

Sadly a virus destroyed the vineyards but the town prospered again as a vacation spot and the home of artists and artisans.

We took the train up to Szentendre. And when we got off the train we were TERRIBLY unimpressed. There was nothing to be seen but a dusty train station and an uninviting commuters' snack shop!

After a bit of aimless poking about we entered into a civilized difference of opinion as to which way the river might be found, based on attempts to read a map that was posted under a glass panel, oriented the wrong way, and in Hungarian, of course. Fortunately, a fellow American appeared, handed us his tourist map of Szentendre and pointed the way into town.

(We won't say whose reading of the map proved to be right. She prefers to be modest about such things.)

It turned out to be a beautiful town, well-preserved with faithful renovation and carefully-designed new construction. Lots of souvenir and craft shops.


The, generally, small vacation cottages on the Danube, especially those on the several islands, are a pretty sight as viewed from the boat ride back to Budapest. We hope American developers don't show up buy up the riverfront property and begin to erect McMansions. Most of the houses in the Hungarian countryside were similarly modest.( We wonder if that's an expression of taste or a holdover from the days of the Peoples' Republic.)

We couldn't resist taking a typical tourist shot of Regina on the boat. Notice the Hungarian flag behind her (which she mistook for an Italian flag the first few times she saw it) and Szentendre in the background.

The parliament building architecture is strikingly "democratic" or perhaps "catholic" in the true sense of the word. On the larger view of the photo at left you can see flying buttresses just above the cruise boat, Roman stacked arches to the right, an almost flamboyant Baroque bell tower on the riverfront and a somewhat Romanesque dome rising above it all.

When we got off the boat returning from Szentendre, we heard music. It turned out to be the Hungarian Army band, performing for a "Military Day" celebration in a nearby restaurant. Their uniforms were rather drab in the old Soviet style but the music was really good.

As the band played, dignitaries in heavily decorated dress uniforms arrived by limo and entered the restaurant between two ramrod-straight young soldiers "guarding" the door. Two interesting details -- no women in the band, and the cymbals were not Ziljian. Every percussionist knows that they make the best cymbals in the world. But Ziljian is a Turkish company. We think that explains it.

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