5 Days in Eger

Walk up through the gate to Eger Castle. In September 1552 an Ottoman army laid siege to it with an army that legend puts at 150,000 and historians at around 35,000-40,000. Inside were about 2,000 defenders under István Dobó: soldiers, peasants who had fled in from the villages, and the women of Eger, remembered (and painted by Bertalan Székely) pouring hot tar and boiling water on the attackers. Against them stood the armies of Kara Ahmed and Ali Pasha. The defenders held for 39 days, dug countermines to find the Ottoman tunnels and threw home-made gunpowder bombs, which tradition credits to Gergely Bornemissza, the hero of the novel; on 17 October the besiegers gave up. It was the first great victory after a year in which castle after castle had fallen, and it still means a lot here.

Give it a full morning. The Gothic bishop's palace has the main exhibition on the castle's history, the Hall of Heroes holds the red-marble lid of Dobó's tomb and the names of the 315 defenders who are known, and you can walk into the underground casemates, dug in the 1570s, after the siege, when the castle was rebuilt. Look for the foundations of the cathedral of St. John inside the walls: Eger was one of the first bishoprics St. Stephen founded around 1000, which is why its bishops ran the town for centuries. Then walk the ramparts and climb to the highest point for the view over the town's red roofs and church towers, with the Bükk hills behind.

Just below the castle gate, on Tinódi tér, Macok Bisztró has a Michelin Bib Gourmand, the guide's mark for good cooking at fair prices, and a good introduction to food from this corner of Hungary: game from the Bükk, trout from Szilvásvárad, mangalica, the curly-haired Hungarian pig, and a long list of Eger wines by the glass.

If you'd rather keep it simple, have a gulyás, the paprika-red beef soup that is Hungary's national dish, at any of the small restaurants around the castle.

Walk down to Dobó István tér, the main square, where Dobó stands with his sword raised and, a few steps away, a statue group shows the defenders fighting on the walls. On one side, the Minorite Church of St. Anthony of Padua, built in 1758-73, is a fine baroque church whose curved two-towered facade the view on every Eger postcard. The inside is light and calm, with a ceiling painted by Márton Reindl and altarpieces by Johann Lukas Kracker, whose biggest work you'll see tomorrow.

Stay a while on the square with an ice cream; the little Eger stream runs along one side.

Two streets north stands the minaret, about 40 meters of slim, fourteen-sided stone tower, built in the early 1600s for a mosque that is long gone. It's the northernmost Ottoman minaret still standing in Europe. After the Ottomans left in 1687, legend says the townspeople tried to pull it down with 400 oxen and failed; the mosque became a church and was demolished in 1841, and the minaret ended up with a cross on top.

You can climb it, 98 steps up a spiral staircase so narrow that your shoulders touch both walls, to a tiny balcony with a big view. It's not for anyone claustrophobic, and two people can't pass each other on the stairs.

End the day at the Turkish Bath (Török fürdő) next to the Archbishop's Garden, built under the Ottoman occupation in the 1610s. The old octagonal pool sits under a dome, and around it are newer pools, saunas and a hammam where you can have a soap massage the Turkish way. The water is warm and slightly radioactive, which Hungarians consider good for you.

A ticket gives you two and a half hours. Move between the hot pools and the steam room, then lie back under the dome.

Start at the Lyceum, a huge baroque college built in the 1760s to 1780s, mostly under Bishop Károly Eszterházy, who wanted to turn it into a university. Vienna never allowed it, but he built on in hope, and it's a university today.

Go up to the library first, a baroque hall of carved bookcases under a ceiling fresco of the Council of Trent painted by Johann Lukas Kracker and his assistant in 1778. Then climb the tower to the old observatory and, at the top, the camera obscura from the 1770s, a lens and mirror that projects a live picture of the town onto a table in a dark room. It's one of the oldest still working anywhere, and watching people cross Dobó tér in real time on a table, 250 years later, is hard to tire of. On the way down, the terrace has the best view of the old town.

Across the square is the Eger Basilica, considered the second-largest church in Hungary after Esztergom. It was built in 1831-37 by József Hild, who also finished Esztergom, in a severe neoclassical style that looks more like a parliament than a church, with a wide flight of steps lined by statues of kings and apostles by the Venetian sculptor Marco Casagrande. Inside, it's the sheer size you notice, and the organ is one of the biggest in the country.

Next door is the Archbishop's Palace, the seat of the archbishops of Eger, opened as a visitor center in 2016. It has the treasury of the church of Eger, a room painted with birds that was found under later plaster in 2013, and the bishops' private chapels, and it explains how these churchmen ran their town for 200 years. The palace café, with a terrace on the garden, is a good stop for lunch or a coffee. If you want to go under the town, the old archbishop's cellars below Eszterházy tér are open as Időalagút, a guided show through the tunnels; it's in Hungarian, so ask about English before you book.

Walk along Kossuth Lajos utca, Eger's baroque street of canons' palaces, to the County Hall, where the two wrought-iron Fazola gates of 1761 show off a local smith's skill. Then cut back past Dobó tér to the market hall on Katona tér for a lángos, the deep-fried flatbread with sour cream and cheese, or pick up some cheese and sausage for the cellars tonight.

Ten minutes further north, the Serbian Orthodox church of St. Nicholas has a gilded iconostasis of the 1790s. Serbian merchants settled in Eger after the Ottomans left, and they are thought to have brought red wine-making with them.

Walk 20-25 minutes southwest from the center, take the little tourist train from Dobó tér, or a taxi, to the Valley of the Beautiful Women (Szépasszony-völgy), a horseshoe of 150-200 wine cellars dug into the soft tuff hillsides. Nobody knows who the beautiful women were. Some cellars are little more than a door, a barrel and a table outside; others are proper wineries with restaurants. Be choosy: many cellars sell cheap semi-sweet wine by the plastic bottle to coach groups. The serious Eger producers, St. Andrea, Thummerer, Gál Tibor, Bolyki and Kovács Nimród among them, mostly pour in their own wineries or in town, so look for those names.

The way to do it is to wander and taste. Ask for a kóstoló (tasting), and the winemaker will draw wine out of the barrel with a glass pipette into your glass. Taste the Bikavér, the local red blend, and Egri Csillag, the white blend, compare a few cellars, and have dinner in one of the restaurants at the end of the valley.

From the mouth of the valley, a narrow-gauge forest railway runs 4.5 km up the Szalajka valley to the Fátyol waterfall. Ride up and walk back down, an hour or a little more, starting at the waterfall itself, where the water slides like a veil (fátyol) over a staircase of mossy tufa terraces. On the way down you pass an open-air forestry museum and trout ponds that have been here for a hundred years. If you have the legs, a steep path climbs from the Szalajka spring to the Istállós-kő cave, where Stone Age hunters camped some 30,000-40,000 years ago.

It's busy on summer weekends; in autumn, with the beeches turning, it's lovely even on a Saturday.

The cold streams of the Szalajka are known for trout, raised in the ponds right in the valley, and the restaurants at its mouth serve it grilled with garlic, fried, or smoked, which is the local specialty. Have it with a glass of Egri Csillag and a slice of strudel.

Szilvásvárad is the home of the Hungarian Lipizzaner. The state stud farm moved here in 1952, to the estate of the Pallavicini family, whose castle still stands in the village, and the white horses are bred in the stables and paddocks around it. You can visit the stud yard and a carriage museum. Szilvásvárad is a big name in carriage driving: it hosted the World Driving Championship in 1984.

On the way back, if there's time before the train, stop at Bélapátfalva for its abbey church at the foot of the white cliffs of Bél-kő. Cistercian monks founded it in 1232, and it's the best-preserved Romanesque Cistercian church in Hungary, though not untouched: it was damaged in the wars of the Middle Ages, fell into ruin under the Ottomans and was rebuilt as a parish church in the 1730s. A two-billion-forint restoration finished in May 2026, but the church was closed again that summer over a dispute about its permit, so you may only see it from outside. It's a 30-minute walk from Bélapátfalva station.

Take the train or bus back in the late afternoon, and spend the evening in the old town. Eger's wine bars are the place to taste more: Gál Tibor's Fúzió, near Katona tér, is a winery's own bar with a small Bikavér exhibition, and other wineries have their own tasting rooms in town.

Lillafüred is a resort squeezed into a forested gorge, and its centerpiece is the Palace Hotel, a turreted castle in the style of King Matthias's time, finished in 1929-30 on the shore of Lake Hámori. Walk down through its hanging gardens to the waterfall below, at 20 meters the highest in Hungary. It's man-made: the Szinva stream was diverted over the cliff when the hotel was built.

At the bottom of the hanging gardens, next to the waterfall, is the entrance to the Anna Cave, formed in calcareous tufa, so the walls are full of the shapes of plants and leaves turned to stone. Guided tours take about half an hour. Half a kilometer up the road, the István Cave has stalactites, and a little further on is the memorial house of Ottó Herman, the 19th-century naturalist.

The narrow-gauge LÁEV railway runs from Dorottya utca in Miskolc's Diósgyőr district through the gorge to Lillafüred and on to Garadna, past a trout farm, through tunnels and over viaducts. Ride from Lillafüred to Garadna and back, about an hour; it's the nicest way to see the valley. The line starts next to Diósgyőr Castle, which is closed for reconstruction.

The restaurants by the lake serve the classics: paprikás csirke, chicken paprikash with sour cream and nokedli dumplings, or lecsó, peppers and tomatoes stewed with paprika. Finish with a Dobos torta, the layered cake with a caramel top.

From Lillafüred it's about an hour by local bus, with a change, to Miskolctapolca and one of the most unusual baths in Hungary: the Cave Bath, where warm thermal water fills a natural cave and you swim through its rock passages and chambers. A fire closed it in September 2024; the cave pools and the sauna house reopened at the end of September 2026. Stay until early evening, then take the bus to Miskolc-Tiszai (about 25 minutes) for a train back to Eger.

Géza Gárdonyi moved to Eger in 1897 and lived here until his death in 1922, in a small house behind the castle where he wrote Egri csillagok (Eclipse of the Crescent Moon), the novel about the siege, serialized from 1899, that every Hungarian reads at school. His study, with its carved desks, is as he left it, and he's buried in the castle, under the inscription Csak a teste ("Only his body").

Walk back down for coffee and something sweet. Kopcsik Marcipánia is a museum of some 150 marzipan and sugar sculptures by a local confectioner, including a whole baroque room made of sugar that took three years, and it sells the real thing too. Then sit down in a cukrászda (pastry shop) on the main streets for a coffee and a slice of cake, or grab a kürtőskalács, the chimney cake rolled in sugar, from a stall.

The Eger Thermal Bath sits in the Archbishop's Garden, the old hunting park of the bishops and now the biggest park in town, and has 13 indoor and outdoor pools fed by warm springs. The old plane tree in the garden was voted European Tree of the Year in 2013. It's a local's bath, not a showpiece: families, old men doing slow lengths and a lángos stand by the outdoor pools.

Take a taxi or a Volánbusz regional bus 15 minutes southwest to Egerszalók, where water at about 68°C from a deep well runs over a hillside and has built up white mineral terraces, like a small Pamukkale. You can't bathe on the terraces themselves, but a walkway runs past them, and at dusk the steam rises off the white stone. The Saliris spa next door uses the same water, if you want another soak. Just outside the village are cave dwellings cut into the tuff, where people lived until the 20th century, and in the hills nearby the kaptárkövek, "beehive stones", rock cones with niches carved into them centuries ago.

Back in town, have a last dinner with a good bottle. Order a Bikavér Superior or Grand Superior, the top grades, from one of the producers you tasted in the valley, with pörkölt, the paprika stew, or game. Pont Gasztroműhely, by the castle entrance, does modern small plates, and several restaurants around Dobó tér pour wines from the best producers by the glass.