The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I met precisely zero foreign tourists during my weekend in Debrecen’
Ed Grenby finds himself surrounded by charming locals and enigmatic museums in this quirky Hungarian city
Lajos Kossuth looks very cross. That’s perfectly understandable given his parents seem to have named him after receiving a bad hand in Scrabble.
But what’s strange is, that this glowering hulk of a man has been handed a six-foot sword to hold, and anointed as the welcoming face of Hungary’s second-largest city.
You’ll see his photo all over Visit Debrecen’s brochures and websites, but to look him in the eye – or, more likely, the toe, because this bronze statue stands stern and proud on a high stone plinth – you’ll need to find the city’s central square.
That’s not hard in a place as small, lovely and overlooked-by-tourists as Debrecen. But if for any reason you struggle, look for the Reformed Great Church, the massive fondant-fancyyellow church that made Kossuth famous, and can hold 2,000 people.
He didn’t build it – you don’t get a statue for designing a church that has burnt down as many times as this one – but he did proclaim Hungarian independence from within its stately Baroque walls back in 1849.
Step inside and you’ll find an explanatory leaflet detailing such bafflingly proud boasts as “biggest Gothic church beyond the river Tisza” (me neither) and “the bell weighs 50 quintal” (me neither). But you’ll also find you can scamper around in the loft above the church’s enormous dome, where atmospheric creaks in the rafters and a monster-high bell (looks more like 51 quintals to me), seem perfectly ready for someone to hang off in the climactic scenes of some movie.
And that’s Debrecen in a nutshell: nothing, sights-wise, that’s going to worry the burghers of Budapest, but easily a good weekend’s worth of quirky charm – not to mention rib-sticking meat-based feasts in every restaurant, and more homely pubs and foxy bars than a city with this many weird little museums has a right to.
I earned my first pint of sword-sharp Dreher lager with a visit to the Déri Museum, where a random assemblage of cool stuff (Egyptian mummies! Samurai armour! Stone Age skeletons!) is balanced by a – thankfully – unrivalled collection of very dull jars and oil paintings mostly by or of men called János, as well as a history of the city in minute coin-by-coin detail.
I’m probably due a whole Methuselah of Dreher, mind, after my turn round the Calvinist College. Founded in 1538, it’s home to another set of unfathomable exhibits, labelled only in Hungarian, and I can’t even work out the theme or name (the Municipal Museum of Miscellaneous Wooden Objects? Now incorporating the Regional Collection of Random Unidentifiable Old Things?).
Instead of beer I’m rewarded, on the very same site, by the College’s truly gorgeous Grand Library, where tome upon splendid tome lines galleried chambers, and the smell of ancient leather-bound vellum makes you feel you’ve wandered into a Philip Pullman tale.
Back out in the sunshine (it’s 27C when I visit, in the last days of September), I saunter into the pedestrianised town centre – like one huge, blissfully traffic-free civic square, where the shushing fountains and sighing trams seem to whisper, “I wouldn’t bother with any more sights if I were you …”
I don’t, and instead pick a restaurant purely on the basis of how pleasingly rotund the people leaving it are. (There’s no point asking “where the locals go” because everyone here is local; I meet precisely zero foreign tourists during my weekend.)
Flaska Vendéglö is entered via what looks like a pizza oven stuck on the side of a small block of flats, but spiral steps take me down to a barrel-vaulted cellar of dark wooden beams and old brickwork where the menu clearly hasn’t changed since the 15th century.
I settle for goulash soup (when in Hungary…) and “pig’s knuckles”, which turns out to be a hunk of pork the size of my head, on a bed of fat chips and – as the single, grudging concession to the existence of vegetables and the possibility of not dying of heart disease right here at the table – smothered with crispy fried onions. It’s irresistibly crackling-crunchy, and I eat way past the point of uncomfortable fullness until my jaws ache.
Waddling off in search of evening entertainment, I ask the lady in the tourist office what’s on in town tonight – and she scratches her head, checks a few leaflets and comes back with precisely zero.
Nonplussed (though not, if I’m honest, all that surprised), I wander back out. Within one block, I find the city’s imposing 19th-century theatre; a music college; and two high schools, and as I stroll between them I hear trumpeters tuning up in one; cellists practising in another; and
students learning the lines of their songs together from their mobile phones on a bench in the mini Ady Park, while others browse the honesty book stall there.
There may be no big crowd-pullers in Debrecen tonight (any night? Any day?), but it’s a lovely place for a potter.