Szeged - photos by endre novak

the fourth largest city of Hungary, the regional centre of South-Eastern Hungary and the capital of the county of Csongrad.

The name Szeged might come from the Hungarian word for corner because of the turn of the river Tisza there. Others say it comes from the Hungarian word sziget which means "island".

Szeged is situated near the southern border of Hungary, just to the south of the mouth of the Maros River, on both banks of the Tisza River (Theiss, Tiscia). Due to the high number of sunshine hours annually, Szeged is often called City of Sunshine (a name she shares with another Hungarian city, Debrecen.)

Szeged is known as the home of paprika, a spice made from dried, powdered capsicum vegetables. Paprika arrived in Hungary in the second half of the 16th Century as an ornamental plant. About 100 years later the plant was cultivated as a herb, and paprika as we know it was born.

Today the inner city of Szeged has beautiful buildings and wide avenues. This is mainly due to the great flood of 1879, which literally wiped away the whole town (only 265 of the 5723 houses remained and 165 people died).

Today's Szeged is an important university town and a popular tourist attraction. One of that is the famous Open Air Plays of Szeged (first held in 1931); they are held every summer.

Since its origins as a Roman trading post in the second century A.D., the city has owed its prosperity to the Tisza and Maros Rivers that converge here. So it's not surprising to find it filled with fountains and marked architecturally by that most liquid of styles, Art Nouveau. In fact, at the turn of the century, Szeged served as the drawing board of a daring practitioner of Art Nouveau, Ede Magyar, who has been compared to Gaudi. His bravado continues to enliven the town: It's in the half-naked tin women clinging with stiff arms to the cupola of the Ungar-Mayer House on Dugonics Square; in the alabaster girls -- modeled after famous ballerinas -- offering flowers to anyone entering the Goldschmidt Palace; in the unevenly crenelated roof line, the undulating balconies, the pale purple and pastel-green waterlilies melting into the ivory facade of the Reok Mansion. Its corner curved like a ship's prow, the mansion breasts into a small square. It is probably the most supple and serene of the more than 20 Ede Magyar buildings still standing.