Zirc Abbey

Cistercians settled at Zirc in 1182, were driven out in the Ottoman wars, and returned in the eighteenth century to build the Baroque abbey and church that stand today in the middle of the Bakony hills. The building people come for is the library: the Reguly Antal hall, fitted in the 1850s with shelving, galleries and reading furniture carved from oak by a local craftsman over years, holding tens of thousands of volumes in a room where the woodwork is the exhibit. The abbey also runs a natural history museum of the Bakony and keeps an arboretum behind the buildings, laid out from the eighteenth century, with mature exotic trees and a stream.

What you actually see

• The carved oak library hall - shelving and galleries cut by hand in the 1850s.
• The Baroque abbey church - the eighteenth-century rebuilding.
• The Bakony natural history museum - the region collected and displayed.
• The arboretum - mature exotics behind the abbey.

When to go

April to October for the arboretum; the library and museum are open year round with reduced winter hours. Half a day. The library is entered on timed visits.

Honest expectations

The library is a single room and photography inside is restricted. Guiding is mostly in Hungarian. Zirc has few restaurants and little open in the evening. Trains from Veszprem are infrequent.

Nearby

Csesznek castle is north-west; Veszprem lies south.