Esztergom

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1147, a French visitor named Odo of Deuil wrote that "the Danube carries the economy and treasures of several countries to Esztergom." The city sits on the river's right bank, 46 km northwest of Budapest. Slovakia lies on the opposite shore, because the Danube marks the border at this point. This documentary follows one hill above that river through many lives. Why did kings, archbishops and sultans all fight to hold it? Where does the strange name come from? And what survives of everything that was built, burned and rebuilt there?

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• 2. A Contested Name

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  A document from 1079-1080 gives the earliest early medieval mention of the town. It names a "strigonensis comes", a count of Strigonium. That Latin name followed the Roman town of Solva. Scholars have argued about its meaning ever since.

  The first guess came from Antonio Bonfini, who read it as Istrogranum. In his view it meant a city where two rivers meet. One was the Ister, the Greek name for the Danube. The other was the Gran, the Latin name for the river Hron. That explanation is still popular. Another theory looked to Germanic roots. After Charlemagne conquered the country, it said, the Franks named their easternmost castle Osterringun, much like the town of Östringen. Pavel Jozef Šafárik instead pointed to a Slavic word, ostřehu, meaning a guarded or fortified place.

  In 1927, Konrad Schünemann gathered these older views and proposed a Slavic stem, strěg, meaning guard. Ján Stanislav later extended the idea. He also explained the missing first vowel in Latin and Czech sources, which show forms such as Střehom. Hungarian regularly adds a vowel before such consonant groups, as when Stephan became István. Both scholars noticed how many Slavic place names stand in the region, among them Vyšegrad, Komárno and Toplica. Šimon Ondruš later offered a plainer reading. He traced the name to the Proto-Slavic stregti, to watch, and its participle stregom, a guard post. The initial O in later Slavic forms, he argued, came from splitting the phrase "in Strägom" in the wrong place. Slovak shows the same pattern, where Bdokovce became Obdokovce.

  One rival idea derived the name from the Slavic strgun, a tanner, or from a Proto-Bulgaric phrase for leather armor. Ondruš calls that obsolete and unreliable, since it rests on late sources and the word never entered Hungarian. Every neighbouring language has its own version. Croatians say Ostrogon, Poles say Ostrzyhom, Czechs say Ostřihom and Slovaks say Ostrihom. Serbian and Turkish sources use Estergon. Germans call the town Gran, which is also their name for the river Garam. Across the Danube stands Štúrovo, which Hungarians call Párkány. In Belarusian, Polish and Ukrainian, the word parkan is an ordinary term for a fence line.

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• 3. Capital of the Árpáds

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  Recent excavations show that people lived on Castle Hill, the Várhegy, at the end of the Ice Age, some 20,000 years ago. The first people known by name were Celts from Western Europe, who settled around 350 BC. Their thriving settlement lasted until Rome conquered the region and turned it into an important frontier town of Pannonia. Slavic peoples moved into the Pannonian Basin at about 500 AD. In the 9th century the area was mostly under Frankish control, and it may also have belonged to Great Moravia. The Magyars entered the basin in 896 and completed their conquest in 901.

  In 960, Géza, the ruling prince of the Hungarians, chose Esztergom as his residence. His palace stood on the Roman castrum on Castle Hill. There his son Vajk, later called Saint Stephen of Hungary, was born around 969-975. At Easter in 973, Géza sent a delegation to the peace conference of Emperor Otto I in Quedlinburg. He offered peace to the emperor and asked for missionaries.

  A basilica dedicated to Saint Adalbert filled the centre of the hill, and legend says Adalbert baptised the young Stephen. The church held the seat of the archbishop, head of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary. Stephen was crowned in Esztergom, either on Christmas Day in the year 1000 or on the 1st of January 1001. For the next two centuries or so, the country's only mint operated here. The archbishop led the ten bishoprics Stephen founded, often handled important affairs of state, and alone held the right to crown kings. The town remained the royal residence until the Mongol siege of 1241.

  Emperor Conrad II met Géza II in Esztergom in 1147, and Frederick Barbarossa later visited Béla III. Arnold of Lübeck, the historian travelling with Barbarossa, called Esztergom the capital of the Hungarian people, "quae Ungarorum est metropolis". Below the hill, royal servants, merchants and craftsmen built the richest settlement of the Árpád age. Its council came from the wealthiest citizens, including families of French, Spanish, Dutch and Italian origin. Their seal became the basis of the city's coat of arms in the 13th century.

  Rogerius of Apulia, a canon of Nagyvárad, witnessed the Mongol attack, which he called a Tatar siege. He recorded it in his Carmen Miserabile, the Sad Song. He wrote: "since there was no other town like Esztergom in Hungary, the Tatars were considering crossing the Danube to pitch a camp there." That is exactly what happened once the Danube froze. The capital of the Árpád age fell in a vicious battle. Some residents escaped into the castle and survived, and newcomers soon began rebuilding, but the town never regained its leading role. Béla IV gave the palace and castle to the archbishop and moved his residence to Buda. Even so, he and his family were buried in the Franciscan church in Esztergom, which he rebuilt in 1270 after the invasion wrecked it. From then on, the castle would be built up and decorated by bishops rather than kings.

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• 4. After the Mongols

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  In 1304, forces of the Czech king Wenceslaus II occupied and raided the castle. It was one more blow in the chaotic years after the fall of the House of Árpád. The citizens meanwhile struggled to keep their town rights against the church, which was expanding inside the royal town. Róbert Károly and later Louis the Great patronized the town. In 1327 the southeastern suburb of Kovácsi, with three churches and mostly blacksmiths, goldsmiths and coiners among its residents, merged with Esztergom.

  In the 14th and 15th centuries, Esztergom stood beside Buda as one of the most influential centres of Hungarian culture. Its court resembled the royal courts of Buda and Visegrád. Visitors included Louis the Great, Sigismund of Luxembourg and King Matthias Corvinus. Scholars and artists came too, among them Galeotto Marzio, the astronomers Regiomontanus and Marcin Bylica, Georg von Peuerbach and Pier Paolo Vergerio. Antonio Bonfini, the historian of King Matthias, left the fullest portrait. He praised the building work of János Vitéz, the king's educator, who put up a library and an observatory beside the cathedral.

  Bonfini described a spacious hall for knights in the castle, fronted by what he called "a wonderful loggia of red marble". Beside it stood the Chapel of Sibyls, its walls painted with the prophetesses. The knights' hall displayed the likeness of every king, along with the Scythian ancestors. Between two gardens rose a round tower of red marble with several rooms and balconies. Bonfini added that Vitéz had Saint Adalbert's Basilica covered with glass tiles. Matthias's widow, Beatrix of Aragon, lived in the castle for ten years, from 1490 to 1500.

  Archbishop Tamás Bakócz, who died in 1521, left the next great monument. In 1507 he had Italian architects build a chapel, the earliest and most significant Renaissance building surviving in Hungary. Andrea Ferrucci, a sculptor from Fiesole, carved its altarpiece from white marble in 1519, two years before the archbishop's death.

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• 5. The Ottoman Frontier

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  Between 1526 and 1543, Esztergom was besieged six times. The Battle of Mohács in 1526 had killed the archbishop of Esztergom and left Hungary with two rival kings. Sometimes the attackers were the forces of Ferdinand I or John Zápolya, and sometimes they were Ottomans. In 1530, Ferdinand I occupied the castle and garrisoned it with foreign mercenaries. He also sent the chapter and the bishopric to Nagyszombat and Pozsony. That move is why part of the treasury, the archives and the library survived.

  In 1543, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent attacked the castle and captured it. A stone table with Ottoman Turkish writing still commemorates his victorious siege. It stands by the northern end of the town wall, on the bank of the Nagy-Duna. Esztergom, now called Estergon, became the centre of an Ottoman sanjak, a province governing several counties. It was also a major castle on the empire's northwestern border. The Ottomans needed it to block attacks on the mining towns of the highlands, on Vienna and on Buda.

  In 1594, during an unsuccessful but devastating siege, the poet Bálint Balassa died in action by the walls of the Víziváros. He was the first Hungarian poet to gain European significance. The worst siege came in 1595, when the troops of Count Karl von Mansfeld and Count Mátyás Cseszneky retook the castle. Victory was costly. Most medieval buildings in the castle and town were destroyed, and the conquerors found only uninhabitable ruins.

  In 1605 the Ottomans regained the castle and the whole region, and they held it until 1683. They mostly fortified the castle, but they also built mosques, minarets and baths. The siege of 1683 destroyed these structures along with the contemporary buildings, though some Turkish buildings lasted into the early 18th century. The Ottomans attacked for the last time in 1685, and Buda fell the following year. During those battles the cavalry captain János Bottyán disappeared, later becoming a legendary figure of the Rákóczi war of independence. Ferenc Rákóczi's long siege, which finally succeeded, burned down everything rebuilt at the end of the century.

  Settlers from Hungary, Slovakia and Germany resettled the ruined land. Where 65 Hungarian villages had stood, only 22 were rebuilt. The reconstructed town received free royal rights, yet in size and importance it was only a shadow of its former self. Around 1730-17 independent crafts were working in Esztergom, and wine growing mattered as well. The Baroque views of the downtown and the Víziváros took shape in the same years, with the finest buildings gathered around the marketplace.

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• 6. The Great Basilica

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  The dome of Esztergom Basilica rises 71.5 m, and the church is the largest in Hungary. Its story began in 1761, when the bishopric regained control of the castle and started planning a new religious centre. To clear the middle of Castle Hill, workers carried away the remains of the churches of Saint Stephen and Saint Adalbert. The bishopric was resettled there in 1820. Construction then ran from 1822 to 1869 under the plans of Pál Kühnel, János Páckh and József Hild. Work slowed along the way and at one point came to a halt. Ferenc Liszt wrote the Mass of Esztergom to mark the occasion.

  The classicist interior is enormous, with giant arches and a vast altarpiece by Michelangelo Grigoletti. On one side, the Saint Stephen chapel displays glittering relics of Hungarian and other saints, along with valuable jewellery. On the south side stands the Bakócz Chapel, the only chapel to survive the Middle Ages. The builders took it apart into 1600 pieces and built it back into the new church in its original form.

  The treasury holds masterpieces of medieval goldsmith's work by western European masters. Among them are a silver cross in use since the 13th century, ornate chalices and a processional cross by Francesco Francia. The upper part of the well-known Matthias-Calvary is decorated in the rare ronde-bosse enamel technique. A large collection of Hungarian and European textiles includes chasubles, liturgical vestments and robes. The bell in the southern tower can be heard from kilometers away. From the top of the dome, the Börzsöny, Visegrád, Pilis and Gerecse ranges fill the view to the north, east and south. To the west, the Danube valley opens toward the Small Plains.

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• 7. Watertown and Its Squares

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  The Víziváros, or Watertown, takes its name from the banks of the Small and Great Danube and the hot springs nearby. Its fortresses, walls, bastions and Turkish rondellas can still be seen on a walk along the river. Among Baroque and classicist buildings stands the Primate's Palace, designed by József Lippert in 1880-82. It houses the Christian Museum, founded by Archbishop János Simor. The museum holds Hungarian medieval panel paintings and sculpture, plus Italian and western European paintings and handicrafts from the 13th to 18th centuries. Visitors can see the late Gothic Úrkoporsó, the Lord's coffin, painted wooden sculptures from around 1480. The collection also includes a winged altarpiece by Thomas of Coloswar from 1427.

  The Cathedral Library, built in 1853 to plans by József Hild, stands in the southern part of Watertown. It holds about 250,000 books, with several codices and incunabula among them. One is a Latin commentary on the Song of Songs from the 12th century. Another is the Lövöföldi Corvina, which came from the donations of King Matthias. The Balassa Bible also survives there. In it Balassa's uncle, Balassa András, wrote down the circumstances of his birth and death. Elsewhere in the district, the Jesuits built the parish church between 1728 and 1738. The Baroque Balassa Bálint Museum served as the first county hall after the Turks were driven out.

  Saint Thomas Hill is named for a church that Archbishop Lukács Bánffy built in memory of the martyr Thomas Becket. Becket had been his fellow student at the University of Paris. Both that church and the small Turkish castle on the hill are long gone. In the early 19th century, the masters building the Basilica put up narrow streets and small houses at the summit. At the foot of the hill stands the classicist Fürdő Szálló, the Bath Hotel. Lajos Kossuth stayed there in 1848 on a recruiting tour.

  Széchenyi Square is the main square, and its Town Hall catches every eye. The building began as the single-storey curia of János Bottyán, known as Vak Bottyán, Bottyán the Blind, in 1689. The upper floor was added in 1729. A fire in the 1750s destroyed the house, and the local architect Antal Hartmann rebuilt it. On its facade, a red marble carving shows the coat of arms of Esztergom. Its design is a palace within castle walls, guarded by towers, with the Árpád shields below. On the corner, István Martsa's equestrian statue honours the original owner. In the middle of the square stands György Kiss's Trinity statue of 1900. Elsewhere in town, an orthodox church at 60 Kossuth Lajos street was built around 1770 by Serbian settlers.

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• 8. The Modern City

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  The Treaty of Trianon of 1920 turned Esztergom into a border town and stripped it of most of its former territory. The poet Mihály Babits spent his summers here from 1924 until his death in 1941. His residence became one of the centres of the country's literary life. Meanwhile, in the 1930s, excavations uncovered the Árpád-age palace. Most of it was explored and restored between 1934 and 1938. French architects arrived at the end of the 12th century with the wife of Béla III, a daughter of Louis VII, and built this section. The palace chapel has frescoes from the 12th to 14th centuries. Some of the most beautiful paintings of the early Hungarian Renaissance, from the 15th century, decorate other walls.

  Esztergom had one of the oldest Jewish communities in Hungary, with a place of worship by 1050. In 1326, King Charles I gave the community a plot for a cemetery. At the 1910 census, 5.1% of the population was Jewish. By 1941 there were 1510 Jews in the town, and the community ran an elementary school until 1944. Jewish shops were ordered closed on the 28th of April 1944. A short-lived ghetto was set up on the 11th of May. The shops were handed to non-Jews on the 9th of June. The ghetto's inmates were sent to Komárom in early June and then deported to Auschwitz on the 16th of June 1944. Two forced labour units, mainly of Esztergom Jews, were executed en masse near Ágfalva on the Austrian border in January 1945.

  Soviet troops captured the town on the 26th of December 1944. The Germans pushed them back on the 6th of January 1945 and were finally ousted on the 21st of March 1945. The retreating Germans had also destroyed, in 1944, the Mária Valéria bridge to Štúrovo, which opened in 1895. It was rebuilt in 2001 with European Union support. After the war, Esztergom counted among the most severely devastated towns. Rebuilding slowly erased the traces, and more than 8,000 students attended its schools and college. Local industry made it a vital base for Hungary's tool and machinery trade.

  The Magyar Suzuki plant opened in 1992 as the European base of the Japanese carmaker. It can produce 300,000 vehicles a year, and with 2,682 employees on average in 2022 it is the city's biggest employer. In 1880, the city had 14,944 inhabitants, and 89.3% were native Hungarian speakers. By the 2011 census the population was 28,926, of whom 83.5% declared Hungarian ethnicity and 13.6% declared none. Religion shifted even more. In 1869-93.5% were Roman Catholic, after a privilege of 1708 had banned non-Catholics, apart from a small Serbian Orthodox minority. In 2011 only 45.4% were, while 31.3% did not declare a religion. A new thermal spa opened in November 2005. Twinning links the city with ten towns, starting with Espoo in Finland in 1974. The newest partner, Székesfehérvár, joined in 2023.

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