Tour Audio a Szeged

Szeged exists in its current form because of a catastrophe. On March 12, 1879, the Tisza River flooded and destroyed 95 percent of the city's buildings, killing 150 people. What followed was one of the most remarkable urban reconstruction projects in European history: funded by donations from across Europe and rebuilt under a coherent city plan, Szeged emerged from disaster as a well-ordered city of wide boulevards, ring roads, and a cluster of Art Nouveau and historicist buildings that give the center a handsome coherence it did not have before the flood.

Hungary's most celebrated spice comes from here.

Szeged paprika, ground from the capsicum peppers grown in the sandy plains surrounding the city for more than four centuries, carries a protected designation of origin from the European Union and is considered the finest in the world. Albert Szent-Gyorgyi, working at the University of Szeged in the 1930s, used paprika as his source for isolating Vitamin C in quantities sufficient for analysis, a discovery that earned him the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1937. The connection between a city spice and a Nobel Prize in biochemistry is the kind of detail that Szeged wears with appropriate pride.