F6
EZ EE K
KLMNO In sunny Pecs, Hungary’s history shines IFYOUGO
BY CHRISTINA TALCOTT Dead Romans, Christian
kings,maraudingMongols, Otto- man occupiers, Hapsburg edific- es, pioneering painters and a modernized downtown: All the highlights (and lowlights) of Hungarian history are on display in the little city of Pecs. And today, Hungary’s sunniest town is basking in the glow of its title as a European Capital of Culture for 2010. But like the rocky path from
Roman settlement to humming university town, the road to Pecs’s spruced-up state has been long and bumpy. With the cultural capital des-
ignation — which the town shares this year with Istanbul and Germany’s Ruhr Valley — came the promise of European Union funds for renovating city parks, building a new concert hall, library and arts center and staging concerts, exhibitions and festivals around Pecs and in neighboring towns. But just as funderswere open-
ing their wallets to pay for those ambitious projects, boom! The international banking crisis ex- ploded. And because Hungary is not yet on the euro (it still uses the forint), shaky currency con- version rates and quick-drying loan sources forced the organiz- ers to scramble for funds, delay- ing construction. That’swhy, even on a June trip
to Pecs (rhymeswith “h”), I found myself
stepping around
chopped-up sidewalks, skirting fenced-in construction sites and muddying my shoes on rutted streets. Still, Pecs didn’t fail to charm.
Located in southwest Hungary, it’s known as the “Mediterranean City,” which might seem like a joke given that Hungary is a landlocked country. But some- thing about Pecs’s position be- tween the gentleMatra and Villa- ny hills means that it gets an average of 200 days of sunshine a year. Plus,many of its Hapsburg- era buildings, including the post office and the town hall, are painted in cheerful, candy-color pastels. Wandering the winding streets, you can imagine the sea just around the next corner.
The first stop on any walking
tour of town is the Gazi Kasim Pasha Mosque, now the Inner City Parish Church. It’s generally known as the Mosque Church, however, having first been built as a church, then destroyed and remade as a mosque in the 16th century by the occupying Turks, then remade again into a church after the Turks’ expulsion at the end of the 17th century. It was expanded and redeveloped sever- al times over the ensuing centu- ries, but Arabic inscriptions from
the Koran are still visible in portions of it today.Aprayer apse faces Mecca, and there are dis- tinctive Islamic geometric deco- rations and arches below the central domed roof. When the Turks invadedHun-
gary to expand the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1500s, they found Pecs so inviting that they took over the thriving medieval town, driving locals outside the city walls. Some of those walls still ring the inner city, offering visual interest and a challenging climb for visitors seeking views of Pecs and the hilly countryside beyond. Go up the barbican tow- er at the corner of Klimo Gyorgy and Esze Tamas streets for the best vistas. Pecs’s proximity to the Bal-
kans and Italy — the city calls itself a gateway to the Balkans — is one of itsmajor draws. Around town, the most obvious evidence of these neighbors is found in the restaurants: terrific brick-oven pizza at Az Elefanthoz, luscious pastas at Crystal, and Serbo-Cro- atian restaurant Afium’s lovely “hatted” bean soup,which comes in a ceramic bowl covered with a baked bread top. But long before there were
separate countries whose citi- zens now make Pecs their home, the Romans ruled the city, and what they left behind is stun- ning: numerous tombs of the wealthy Christian citizens of Pecs fromthe 3rd and 4th centuries. Hungary officially became a
Christian nation (thanks to saint- ed King Istvan) in the year 1000, but nearly eight centuries before that there were Christians in Pecs. In the Cella Septichora Visitors Centre, amulti-story lab- yrinth leads to vaulted stone tombs from around A.D. 390, remnants of the city walls, and viewing platforms and windows into the grave sites, with their frescoes depicting saints and Bi- ble scenes, plus still-vivid geo- metric and floral patterns. Inside the nearby Early Christian Mau- soleum is an even older site, an excavated chapel from around
SLOVAKIA AUS. u
HUNGARY Budapest
Pecs CROATIA b ROMANIA 0 MILES 100
GENE THORP/THE WASHINGTON POST SERBIA
275. All of the early Christian spots are now designated UNES- COWorld Heritage sites. The early Christian sites are
right near the remains of the medieval city walls. Just up the hill from them is St. Peter’s Cathedral, whose walls and ceil- ing are covered in stunning late- 19th-century paintings. King Ist- van declared Pecs a bishopric in 1009, but the church that stood on the cathedral’s site was de- stroyed by a fire in 1064, and the basilica now there took another two centuries to build. The Turks used the building as a mosque and its crypt as an armory. On one visit to the cathedral, I
found most of the north wall obscured by scaffolding, part of an ongoing restoration project. At the top of the wooden plat- form, I saw an elderly man gin- gerly retouching saints’ portraits and Bible scenes close to the ceiling. Downstairs in the crypt, I felt
far removed from the ornate church above. Amid the arches and columns in the basement, I noticed children’s artwork. There were paintings, block prints and drawings, both figurative and abstract, of the cathedral and the city, of peace signs and doves, of angels and saints. Some were labeled to indicate last year’s thousand-year anniversary of the Deed of Foundation of the Dio- cese of Pecs, when King Istvan, with the consent of Pope Sergius IV, formally made Pecs a Chris- tian city. I was impressed by the artful
ones, tickled by the naive ones and touched by their collective
GETTING THERE Multiple airlines have one-stop flights from Dulles to Budapest, with fares starting at $948. Trains to Pecs run from Budapest every two hours daily, starting at $34 round-trip.
WHERE TO STAY Hotel Fonix 2 Hunyadi Janos St. 011-36-72-311-680
www.fonixhotel.com Central and budget-friendly, with rooms and apartments of various sizes, starting at about $52 double.
CHRISTINA TALCOTT The pipe organ and ornately painted walls at St. Peter's Cathedral. UKR.
Hotel Diana 4 Tímar St. 011-36- 72-328-594
www.hoteldiana.hu Lovely three-star hotel near the synagogue. Doubles start at $82.
Boutique Hotel Sopianae 24 Felsomalom St. 011-36-72-517-770
www.hotelsopianae.hu Pecs’s first four-star hotel, in a bright yellow building on the edge of the inner city. Doubles start at $150.
WHERE TO EAT Afium 2 Irgalmasok St. 011-36-72-511-434 For food from south of the border (a.k.a. Croatia and Serbia), stop in this basement eatery, where the “hatted” bean soup makes a filling lunch or dinner at around $4.
ADEE BRAUN AMediterranean touch: Pastel-hued buildings line Pecs lanes.
effect. Those paintings, tacked to boards propped against stone columns there in the crypt,might have been just part of some parochial school homework as- signment. But they made me think about what itmight be like to be a kid in Pecs, wondering how long a thousand years is, knowing there’s history even old- er than that beneath the cobble- stones outside the cathedral doors. And about how a city’s culture can spark the imagina- tion of its children simply by being visible in everyday life, in the churches and the museums and the crumbling stone walls.
Of course, children’s art is far
fromthe only kind in Pecs.One of the city’s major projects is the restoration of Kaptalan Utca, which is known as Museum Street for its glut of offerings: the newly-reopened Vasarely Muse- um, showing works by the Pecs- born pop-art pioneer Victor Vasarely; the Zsolnay Museum, which chronicles the develop- ment ofworks by the Pecs ceram- ics factory; theGallery ofModern Hungarian Art I and II, both slated to reopen in 2011. And nearby is the compact Tivadar
Csontvary Museum, which dis- plays works by the self-taught early-20th-century
painter
whose giant canvases were near- ly lost after his death when his family tried to sell them as truck covers. Luckily, an enterprising art collector bought them in- stead. Back at St. Peter’s, watching
the restorers scraping and plas- tering and grabbing brushes out of fanny packs and buckets at their feet, I realized something: Culture doesn’tmean a thing if it isn’t tended. Maybe that’s what all that mud and construction means; maybe that’s what the European Capital of Culture des- ignation stands for in the end: that preserving the past to bring meaning to the future takes a lot of elbowgrease,money, time and patience. And to witness that transformationinprogress is cer- tainly worth a side trip from Budapest. After two millennia — and a
couple of years of renovation — Pecs is finally ready for the spot- light.
travel@washpost.com
Talcott, a former Travel staffer, recently returned froma year-long sojourn in Central Europe.
Arany Kacsa 4 Terez St. 011-36-72-518-860
www.aranykacsa.hu The “Golden Duck” serves can’t- miss duck dishes and other Hungarian specialties. Entrees start at about $5.50.
Crystal 18 Citrom St. 011-36-72-516-720
www.crystalrestaurant.hu Italian-inspired dishes, including fresh pasta, start at $7 for mains.
WHAT TO DO Pecs 2010 events
www.Pecs2010.hu The tourism office andWeb site have a schedule of more than 400 events throughout the year. Some of the major festivals and exhibitions include the Pan- Balkan Arts Picnic from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5 and “From Art to Life: Hungarians in the Bauhaus,” through Oct. 24. The Pecs visitor center has maps of self-guided, half-day walking tours of the town, and the office also can help arrange guided tours.
INFORMATION Tourinform Pecs 1 Szechenyi Ter. 011-36-72-213-315
—C.T.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010
SMARTMOUTH
A French twist amid clams and oysters
BY SARAH KARNASIEWICZ Every July, the summer people
come to Wellfleet, Mass., out on the sleepy tip of Cape Cod, for baskets of fried clams and buck- ets of the town’s eponymous oys- ters. They’ve always come to bodysurf the waves at Newcomb Hollow or to bike along winding paths of beach plums and scrub pines. They haven’t come for world-class brioche or superla- tive steak frites. Until now. A lot has changed inWellfleet
since March 7, when chef Philippe Rispoli, 37, and baker Boris Villatte, 31 — two talented young Frenchmen who made their names in the kitchens of Paul Bocuse, Daniel Boulud, Eric Kayser and Alain Ducasse before making their way to the outer Cape — welcomed their first customers at PB Boulangerie Bis- tro.
Perched on the south end of
town, at the bend of Lecount Hollow Road, inside a pink ram- bler that last housed a seafood shack, the bakery and cafe has quickly won an enraptured fol- lowing among locals and tourists alike, thanks to inexpensive pain au chocolat, crisp cranberry bread, lip-puckering lemon tarts andoversize flour-dustedbatards and boules so perfect they might have been airlifted straight from the Left Bank. Villatte, who last oversaw the
baking program for the Wynn Resort in Las Vegas, sleeps in a loft above the kitchen and rises
before 4 every morning to begin production: typically 600 to 800 hand-shaped loaves and 900 to 1,300 danishes and croissants each day — though those figures are growing constantly, along with the lines outside the shop. That’s because the ingredients
are excellent and the approach disarmingly personal: All of Vil- latte’s bread is started with natu- ral yeasts, and pastries are topped with local fruit, such as petite wild blueberries, or served with confitures handmade by Rispoli’s mother, Pascalene, on her occasional visits fromLyon. “You know, people have al-
ways been saying you can never make real French bread in the UnitedStates because there isnot the right water, there is not the right flour,” says Rispoli with a shrug and a smile. “But I don’t get it. I say, look at Boris’s work. Or better, taste it.” Happily for the two partners,
that’s an invitation that their customers seem more than will- ing to accept. On a recent morn- ing, in a scene of carb-induced euphoria that seemed cut straight from the movie “Choco- lat,” the outdoor cafe tables were filled to capacity with families and couples drinking dark coffee, tearing into baguettes and lick- ing pastry cream from their fin- gers. “It’s been a wonderful sur- prise,” says Villatte. “Everymorn- ing I come into the shop and someone is pressing their face up against the window to ask when we open.” It’s a sight the two men don’t take for granted. Just two years
year and a half — much longer than hoped, not least because the men didmuch of the work them- selves. In the project’s first week, they sledgehammered walls, pulled down drywall and opened up attics, filling four dumpsters in asmany days. Rispoli’s father arrived from
France and laidwhimsical ocean- motif mosaics on each of the bathroom floors. No detail was overlooked. Even the landscap- ing is edible:Raised beds of herbs and vegetables dot the yard, ring- ing tree trunks and meandering along crushed oyster shell path- ways, overflowing with basil, green peas, rhubarb, swiss chard andmore. The results are rambling,
PB Boulangerie Bistro 15 Lecount Hollow Rd. Wellfleet, Mass. 508-349-1600
www.pbboulangeriebistro.com OpenWednesday through Sunday year-round.
PHOTOS BY SARAH KARNASIEWICZ
Boris Villatte, above right, has been making breads and pastries by the hundreds since he and a partner opened PB Boulangerie Bistro.
ago, Rispoli was working as exec- utive chef at Daniel Boulud Bras- serie, also at theWynn Las Vegas Resort, and had just scored his first Michelin star. But he and Villatte were already nursing a dreamto strike out on their own. Their vision: an informal but first-class neighborhood bakery
and bistro that they could own and build fromthe ground up. In service of that vision,
Rispoli and Villatte sold their homes and their cars, packed up their families, recruited friends and took their case to nine banks before finally securing a loan. That two culinary luminaries
would choose to bypassNewYork and Boston and set up shop on a sleepy strip of sand has come as a pleasant if puzzling surprise to locals, but there is a logic behind the location. Rispoli’s wife, Valer- ia — who also shoulders all front-of-house responsibilities for the restaurant—is aWellfleet native who had introduced her husband and his friend to the charms of the community over years of vacations. Rispoli says that once the
setting occurred to them, it im- mediately felt right. “I feel like I am an apprentice again, 16 years old, just starting out,” he ex- plains. “Here, we relearn to live.” The excitement has had to be
tempered with patience, though. Renovations stretched over a
cheery and bright, with a cozy 50-seat dining room, expansive windows and vaulted ceilings lined in warmpine. While the boulangerie has
been doing brisk business since its spring opening, the launching of the attached bistro on July 15 occupied chef Rispoli’s attention through much of the summer. The well-curated wine list and menu of refined classics such as steak frites, lobster salad a la Russe and local cod in a buttery brothof leek and potato is sophis- ticated but accessible, and priced to keep regulars smiling. And singing, apparently. Past
10 o’clock on opening night, while the room was packed and Rispoli and Villatte shuttled be- tween the dining room and the open kitchen, a table in the corner broke into a spontaneous chorus of “La Marseillaise” over their crepes suzette. Looking on, local playwright Wendy Kessel- man said: “It’s incredible. They’ve inspired the entire town.”
travel@washpost.com
Karnasiewicz, a freelance writer and editor based in New York, blogs at
www.365-kitchen.com.
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