A Serbian Orthodox town of ochre houses and steep lanes, forty minutes up the river on the suburban railway.
Szentendre sits on the west bank of the Danube where the river turns south, and it looks nothing like the Hungarian towns around it. That is because it was largely settled by Serbs — refugees who came north in waves from the late seventeenth century, fleeing Ottoman advances, and who brought their church, their trade connections and their building habits with them.
At its height the town had seven Orthodox churches for a population of a few thousand. Several survive, with iconostases and dark interiors that feel a very long way from Buda.
The old town
Narrow lanes climb from the main square, Fő tér, which has a plague cross of 1763 raised by the Serbian merchants’ guild. The houses are painted in ochre, rust and faded pink, with baroque fronts and courtyards behind. It is small — an hour will walk all of it — and it is extremely pretty, which is why it is also extremely full on summer weekends.
Climb to Templomdomb, the church hill, for the parish church and the best view over the roofs to the river.
Museums
The Ferenczy Museum holds the work of the artists’ colony that formed here from 1929 and made the town a centre of Hungarian modernism. The Margit Kovács Museum shows the ceramicist’s work in a period house and is the one to see if you only see one. The Marzipan Museum is exactly as silly as it sounds and children love it.
Three kilometres north is the Skanzen, the Hungarian Open Air Museum: farmhouses, churches and workshops moved here from villages across the country and rebuilt, with a working narrow-gauge railway between the regions. It needs half a day of its own and is excellent.
Getting there
The H5 HÉV from Batthyány tér in Buda runs every twenty minutes and takes about forty minutes. A Budapest travelcard covers the journey as far as the city boundary; you buy a cheap supplement for the rest, either at the machine or on board. Boats also run in summer from the city centre, which takes longer and is the nicer way to arrive.
