Hodmezovasarhely

Hodmezovasarhely spreads across the southern plain as a town of low houses and wide streets, and its reputation rests on two things. The first is pottery: it was one of the main folk ceramic centres in Hungary, with distinct local styles of painted and black-fired ware, and workshops and the Csucs house museum keep the tradition. The second is painting, since the flat light and hard rural life here drew the Alfold school, whose work fills the Tornyai museum. A third and more unusual museum, the Emlekpont, deals with the four decades of communist rule in one provincial town, reconstructing offices, flats and shop interiors and documenting how the system worked at local level.

History

People have lived near the town for 6,000 years, and Neolithic dwellings sunk into the ground have yielded household goods and the fertility figure known as the Venus of Kökénydomb. The name, "beaver field marketplace", comes from the joining of two Árpád-era villages: Hód, named after the beaver lake, and Vásárhely, the medieval term for a place with the right to hold markets (Wikipedia, Hódmezővásárhely).

The main sights

• Folk pottery workshops - painted and black-fired ware in local styles.
• The Tornyai museum - painters of the Alfold school and the plain.
• The Emlekpont museum - the socialist decades reconstructed in one town.
• Wide streets of low houses - the plain town pattern.

When to go

April to October. Half a day. Museums close on Mondays. The tram-train from Szeged is an easy connection and a curiosity in itself.

Practical notes

The town is flat, spread out and short on atmosphere. Museums are the whole of the visit and several have short hours. Interpretation at the Emlekpont is dense and largely in Hungarian.

Nearby

Szeged is south-west; Opusztaszer lies north-west.

Key facts