Friday, 10th August 2018 Our fifth train of this trip, departing at 08:23, took us on a two and a half hour journey to the city of Debrecen. Debrecen is the centre of the Northern Great Plain region and was the largest Hungarian city in the 18th century. As the site of the uprising, it is an important cultural centre and was the capital city during the Hungarian Revolution [1848–1849] when Lajos Kossuth declared the dethronement of the Habsburg dynasty in the Protestant Great Church of Debrecen. At the end of World War II Debrecen served as the capital of Hungary [1944–1945]. The Protestant Great Church of Debrecen provides quite a striking contrast to the decorative excess of Budapest’s Catholic St Stephen’s Basilica we visited yesterday. Debrecen currently has a population of 318,000. To put that into perspective, we live in Bromley, a commuter suburb of London, with a population of 309,000. In fact, Debrecen is about the size of Bromley, but is much quieter and there is little indication that it is home to that many people. The streets in the centre of town are restricted to trams and cyclists. It is a university town and the peace is perhaps in […]
Daily Archives: 10/08/2018
Thursday, 9th August 2018 A leisurely start to the day, partly because of the promised temperatures of 34º, but also because, unusually for us on a train trip, when we are often up to catch an early train, on this occasion we had a second day to explore/enjoy a location, so we were able to get up for breakfast at 08:45. Although we like to walk, the heat and Robert’s enthusiasm for different forms of transport prompted us to buy one day travel passes which cost 1,650 Ft [£4.59] each. We were pleased that our first experience of the Budapest Metro was catching Line 1 from Deák Ferenctér. The Budapest metro is the oldest electrified underground railway system on the European continent, and the third-oldest electrically operated underground railway in the world. It was predated by the 1890 City & South London Railway (now part of the London Underground) and the Mersey Railway. Line 1 was completed in 1896 and the older stations are a charming step back in time with tiled walls, tiled names, curved wooden storage cupboards and barriers between the lines. The platforms are short and the trains are just two carriages long. The metro took us […]