Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Barcsay Collection
Barcsay Gyűjtemény • Dumtsa Jenő utca 10 • Wed-Sun 10am-5pm • 600Ft
Next door to the Marzipan Museum, the
Barcsay Collection
is dedicated to the work of
Transylvanian-born Jenő Barcsay (1900-88), a long-standing resident and teacher at Szen-
tendre's artists' colony. His dark, prewar canvases - mainly landscapes such as
Transylvani-
an Hills
and
Szentendre Streets
- give way to more abstract works after the war, while his
later pieces included wall-length mosaics, tapestries and Quattrocento anatomical drawings,
these last confirming his skills as a draughtsman.
THE SERBIAN CONNECTION
Before artists moved induringthe first decades ofthe twentieth century,Szentendre'schar-
acter had been forged by waves of refugees from
Serbia
. The first followed the catastroph-
ic Serb defeat at Kosovo in 1389; the second, the Turkish recapture of Belgrade in 1690,
causing 30,000 Serbs and Bosnians to flee. Six thousand settled in Szentendre, which be-
came the seat of the Serbian Church in exile. Prospering through trade, they replaced their
wooden churches with stone ones and built handsome townhouses, but as Habsburg tolera-
tion waned and phylloxera (vine-blight) and floods ruined the local economy they trickled
back to Serbia, so that by 1890 less than a quarter of the population was Serb.
Fő tér and around
At the top of Dumtsa Jenő utca, triangular
Fő tér
swarms with horse-drawn carriages and
sightseersmillingaroundanornate
PlagueCross
,erectedbythemerchants'guildafterSzen-
tendre escaped infection in 1763.
Szentendre Gallery
Szentendrei Keptár • Fő tér 2-5 • Wed-Sun: May-Sept 10am-6pm, Oct-April 2-6pm
The square and surrounding streets are teeming with galleries of varying quality - the
Szen-
tendre Gallery
(Szentendrei Keptár) on the east side of the square at nos. 2-5 mainly
holds temporary contemporary art exhibitions, but sometimes features names such as István
Szőnyi, the twentieth-century Hungarian painter much loved for his Danube Bend land-
scapes.
