Short answers, pulled from the story.
Szeged is the third largest city in Hungary and the regional centre of the Southern Great Plain. It is known as the City of Sunshine, as Hungary's home of paprika, and as a major university city whose University of Szeged was ranked the top Hungarian institution on the Academic Ranking of World Universities in 2005.
The origin of the name Szeged is disputed. Competing theories trace it to Partiscum, a Roman colony from the 2nd century; to the Hungarian word szeg meaning corner, referring to a bend in the Tisza River; to the word sziget meaning island; or to a shade of dark blond describing the color of the water where the Tisza and Maros rivers meet.
The 1879 flood nearly wiped out Szeged entirely, leaving only 265 of 5,723 houses standing and killing 165 people. Emperor Franz Joseph visited and promised the city would be rebuilt more beautifully than before. The reconstruction produced the wide avenues and palace-lined streets that define Szeged's inner city today.
In 1941, 4,161 Jews lived in Szeged. After the German occupation of the 19th of March 1944, they were confined to a ghetto with Jews from surrounding villages. In June 1944 the ghetto was liquidated; the Nazis murdered the larger part of approximately 8,500 people, and others were sent to forced labor at the Strasshof Labor Camp in Austria.
ELI-ALPS, the ELI Attosecond Light Pulse Source, opened in Szeged in 2018. It provides light sources across an extremely broad frequency range in ultrashort pulses with high repetition rates, enabling experiments in attosecond physics. It is one of a small number of facilities worldwide capable of conducting research at this scale.
Albert Szent-Györgyi, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and biology, and Katalin Karikó, Nobel Prize winner in biochemistry, both lived in Szeged. Scientists at the city's Biological Research Centre of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were first in the world to produce artificial hereditary material, in the year 2000.