Explore Pécs

Why visit Pécs

Pécs is the unsung southern Hungarian city — a Mediterranean-feeling place at the foot of the Mecsek mountains where palm trees genuinely grow outdoors, two thousand years of layered history compete for attention, and a generation of contemporary art has put it on the map. The compact medieval centre revolves around Széchenyi Square, dominated by the Mosque of Pasha Qasim — the largest surviving Ottoman building in Hungary, built around 1580 on the foundations of a destroyed Gothic church, and now functioning as a Catholic chapel (the mihrab and arabic inscriptions are still visible inside). Just up the hill, the four-towered Pécs Cathedral and the dramatically blackened Roman Christian Necropolis next door (a UNESCO-listed complex of 4th-century painted burial chambers from the Roman provincial capital of Sopianae) form an extraordinary cluster. Pécs held the European Capital of Culture title in 2010, and the legacy has stuck: the Zsolnay Cultural Quarter, in the restored Zsolnay porcelain factory complex (the city has been famous for its iridescent eosin-glazed ceramics since 1853), now hosts museums, theatres, and one of the country's best contemporary art collections. Don't miss the Csontváry Museum (the wonderfully strange visionary painter), the Vasarely Museum (the Hungarian-born op-art pioneer), and a stroll up to the TV Tower for the panorama over the city and Mecsek.