Featured festivals

  • Visitor guide to Szentendre – We Love Budapest

    When wandering along Szentendre’s curvy cobblestoned lanes that narrowly divide Mediterranean-style clusters of quaint red-roofed homes, visitors commonly feel adrift in time. This picturesque riverfront community just north of Budapest appears essentially unchanged from hundreds of years ago; its Baroque steeples parade heavenward along the hilly town’s tree-jutted skyline while its colourful stone cottages reflect in the Danube below. Szentendre is a culturally captivating destination offering myriad attractions for all ages – discover its many charms with We Love Budapest’s visitor guide.

    Read more on the website of We Love Budapest. >>

    Photo: Norbert Juhász/We Love Budapest

  • A day trip to Szentendre – Ciao Fabello

    Our choice for a small town break from Budapest was charming Szentendre, or St. Andrew. The town is an easy 40-minute train ride along the Danube from Budapest’s central Batthyány tér metro station. The portion of the journey within the administrative bounds of Budapest was covered by our tourist transit pass and we only had to pay a small additional supplement fee to finish the journey on the commuter section of the line.

    We wandered the residential streets around Kör utca on our walk from the train station to the center of town. This quiet, cobblestoned area, though small, was a nice surprise and we had the area to ourselves…

    Read more on the blog Ciao Fabello. >>

  • TOP10 + 1: Szentendre with Children

    Situated by the river Danube, Szentendre is the favourite day-trip destination of people living in Budapest. The small town also offers exciting programmes and events for families with children. Here are some ideas.

     

    1. A walk in the town centre

    One of children’s favourite places in Szentendre is the Danube bank, where they can play, ride their bike or perfect their stone-skipping skills on the water. Once you have soaked up the beautiful view and fed the mallards, head for the town centre. The highlight of the day could be an ice-cream in one of the cake shops in the centre.

    1. Ferenczy Museum Centre (FMC)

    If it’s the second Sunday of the month, then it’s FMC Family Day. While children are shown around the exhibitions by museum education specialists and they can try their hand at different artistic techniques, parents can visit the permanent and temporary exhibitions.

    1. Urban Public Transport Museum

    When in Szentendre, don’t miss the Urban Public Transport Museum at the train terminal. You can get on almost all the vehicles in the indoor museum, which is a good programme on a rainy day, too.

     

     

    1. Retro Design Centre

    A place where time stopped in the 80s. If you would like to tell our children how you or your parents spent their childhood and what were your favourite toys and sweets, then do not miss this exhibition.

    1. Szabó-Szamos Marzipan Museum

    The Marzipan Museum right next door to Szamos Pastry Shop is the country’s first marzipan exhibition. In addition to learning about the history of confectionery and marzipan making, you can find marzipan figures of cartoon characters and famous people.

    1. Children’s Theatre

    Theatre performances and children’s plays await the youngest in Szentendre during the summer. Morning matinee performances are held in Dunaparti Cultural Centre every Sunday morning.

     

     

    1. Open Air Ethnographic Museum (Skanzen)

    There’s always something exciting going in the Szentendre Skanzen. Young children will surely enjoy children’s adventure points: the general store, the photographer’s, the game yard, the Magic Barn, the Tale Garden Playground and the Children’s Farm but they will also like riding the Skanzen train with the engine driver and ticket inspector wearing a contemporary uniform.

    1. Family Saturdays in V-8 swimming pool

    Just like Skanzen, V-8 Indoor Swimming Pool and Leisure Centre offers a full-day programme for children and adults. It is particularly convenient to time your visit for the last Saturday of every month when there is a 50% concession for families. (Concessions for families are available for 3 or more people both in the swimming pool and the wellness centre.)

    1. Parti Medve Bookshop

    The small shop opposite the Town Hall is an especially innovative place with a tasteful interior where apart from children’s books and toys, children and parents can also find a real ‘party place’ where there’s always something happening.

    1. Edenic Sweets Shop

    Life is sweet opposite Szamos Pastry Shop, too. The small chocolate shop was opened in 2003 and has all kinds of chocolate you can imagine.

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    1. Duck Floating

    The most spectacular children’s programme of the Szentendre Open Around the Clock Festival at the last weekend of the summer is the duck floating on Saturday afternoon on Bükkös Stream with the ‘participation’ of 1000 yellow rubber ducks.

  • Art Capital 2018 – In pursuit of Eden

    Art Capital

    Art Capital, Szentendre | 9-24 June 2018

    In Pursuit of Eden

    Rita Ackermann | AES+F | Monika Baer | Žarko Bašeski | Berszán Zsolt | Birkás Ákos | Tim Eitel | Elena Kovylina | Erik van Lieshout | Joana Malinovska | Angelika Markul | Mohau Modisakeng | Nádas Péter | Yoko Ono | Daniel Richter | Kamen Stoyanov | Szűcs Attila | Vincze Ottó and more

    “Now the planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters.”

    (Genesis 2:8-10)

    The garden (in Greek: paradeisos) traditionally symbolizes Paradise. According to the Bible, when, in punishment of the original sin committed by the first man and woman, they were banished from the Garden of Eden, the harmony of creation had fallen out of balance: the lost Paradise only survives as an eternal object of human desire. In creating gardens, humanity attempts,over and over,to reestablish harmony between nature and society. Gardens are simultaneously natural and artificial – they are an artificially created form of nature.

    A garden will say a lot about how its designers and upkeepers relate to the universe, as attested to by the microcosms of Chines and Japanese gardens, the Arab gardens divided into eight parts in accordance with the sectioning of the Koran, the French gardens formed on the dictates of optical principles, and bythose English gardens with their irregularly shaped labyrinths connected to enormous green lawns.

    Our gardens are safe havens we can retreat to, if we seek respite from our rushing world. It is also a place for love, sensuality and beauty. It is a site of meaningful work, as planting seeds and tending to their growth always yields tangible results. Since the ancient cultures of the East, each great historical age had its characteristic garden. Modernity, it appears, is the first era that is without its own distinctive garden-type.

    The central focus of this year’s Art Capital is the way modern humanity relates to nature and longs for Paradise Lost: the idea of the garden. Flowing river and fertile water – defining elements of the Biblical Garden of Eden – are important points of reference for the majority of exhibited works. The nature that we integrate into our living space by the committed and persevering cultivation of the land is also a symbol of self-created freedom. In this context, the projects are connected to the legacy of the Szentendre Plein Air Exhibition, which was initiated half a century ago, and which was founded on the idea of artistic autonomy in defiance of the powers that be.

    Thematic exhibitions, film screenings, literary evenings, special theatre performances and concerts await visitors in Szentendre, at the largest visual arts festival of the region, which extends over geographical borders. The art gardens and temporary exhibitions can be visited even after the conclusion of the programs – until autumn.

     

  • Szentendre is a rich artistic heritage

    Welcome to Szentendre

    Szentendre (‘St Andrew’) is the southern gateway to the Danube Bend but has none of the imperial history or drama of Visegrád or Esztergom. As an art colony turned lucrative tourist centre, and easily accessible from Budapest just 19km south, Szentendre strikes many travellers as a little too ‘cute’, and is crowded most of the year. Still, it’s an easy train trip from the capital, and the town’s dozens of art museums, galleries and churches are well worth the trip. Just try to avoid it on summer weekends.


    Read more information on the lonelyplanet pages >