Pécs

Pécs lies at the southern foot of the Mecsek hills, on the site of the Roman town of Sopianae. Beneath the city are painted burial chambers and memorial chapels of an early Christian cemetery. King Stephen founded a bishopric here in 1009, and the cathedral and its clergy made Pécs an enduring religious centre of southern Hungary.

In 1367 King Louis I founded a university at Pécs, the first in Hungary. The city later became a centre of humanist learning under its bishop Janus Pannonius, a celebrated Latin poet whose patronage helped make the episcopal city a centre of art as well as scholarship. Its prosperity was interrupted by Ottoman invasion: after Mohács in 1526 the town was plundered and burned, and in 1543 it opened its gates to the Ottoman army.

Under Ottoman rule churches became mosques and new baths, religious schools and tombs changed the city's appearance. The mosque of Pasha Qasim rose in the central square, while a Sufi monastery was established at Tettye, alongside the schools and institutions serving the Muslim community. Pécs also remained a busy market town, and the Ottoman historian İbrahim Peçevi took his name from his native city. Habsburg forces captured Pécs in 1686. As churches and civic institutions were restored, buildings from its Ottoman century and a half remained part of the cityscape.