Travels in Hungary [antikvár]

ALL ROADS LEAD TO BUDAPEST Hungary is a "great little country". The poet Róbert Graves once said so. It is little, because it has only about ten millión inhabitants-and yet it is great, because it has given the world dozens of musicians, poets and scientists from Ferenc Liszt to Béla Bartók, from Sándor Petőfi to Attila József, and from the mathematician János Bolyai to the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Albert Szent-Györgyi who discovered vitamin C. Hungary's area is small, too: only 57,000 square miles. But within this small area one can find so many vari ed regions, so many interesting towns, so many beautiful and precious creations of a thousand-year-old culture, and so many agreeable expressions of an even older tradition of gastronomy and hospitality, that the tourist will always be short of time-though never of things to see and enjoy. From whichever direction one approaches Hungary, sooner or later all roads lead to Budapest. In 1433 Bertrand de la Brocquiére, on his way back to Francé from Byzantium, rode from Belgrade to Buda where he passed by an endless plain with grazing herds and galloping horses. György Thurzó, the mayor of Cracow who became the proprietor of a large part of Upper Hungary (as well as an enthusiastic patron of Hungárián cuisine and of Tokaj wines), came from the north, and he found a district rich in hills, valleys and mining towns. Jacob Tollius, the Dutchman who visited Turkish-occupied Buda and Pest in 1660 and described its mosques and minarets, had also crossed picturesque hilly regions. He was still able to see the Gothic arches and turretsof Sigismund of Luxembourg's "Fresh" Palace in Buda, and the marble palace of King Matthias Corvinus at Visegrád. Today only their ruinsremain. Many things have changed, but the first impression you get of Hungary will still be förmed by the direction from which you approach the heart of the country.