Budapest City Attractions

Budapest City Attractions

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Budapest has a lot to offer. First, it's a spa city, so you can experience bathing, health and beauty treatments, new-age therapies and much more in wonderfully decadent surroundings. It is also a city of culture. The banks of the Danube, the Castle district of Buda, and Andr ssy ut and the surrounding historical area are UNESCO World Heritage Sites. It has some excellent museums and galleries and is a city in which 'high culture' is within the reach of everyone. Hungarian cuisine has made great advances lately and a new generation of chefs in Budapest are producing innovative dishes, often based on traditional recipes adapted for 21st-century tastes.

Getting around Budapest is easy, either on foot or by the highly efficient public transport system.
Areas of naturai beauty such as the Buda Hills are easily accessible from Budapest, as are the towns and villages along the scenic Danube Bend. You could also visit Lake Balaton, the nearest thing to the seaside this far inland, or the Puszta, the great plain, with its renowned horsemen. How-ever, you may find so much to do in the city itself that these excursions will have to be saved for another occasion.

A BRIEF HISTORY

The Carpathian and Danube basins have been inhabited since around 350,000bc, according to archaeological evi-dence - fragments of bone and pottery - some of which can be seen in the National Museum in Budapest. However, the first identified occupants were a Celtic-Illyrian tribe, the Eraviscans, refugees from wars in Greece, who settled in the area of today's Budapest in the 3rd century BC. They estab-lished a tribal capital on top of Gellrt Hill and a settlement in buda. Some people believe they called the buda settlement Ak Ink (meaning Ampie Water), which accounts for the later Roman name, Aquincum. Others believe the Roman name comes from aqua, the Latin for water and quinque meaning five. Either way, it demonstrates the importance of water the settlement was founded.

Enter the Romans
In the lst century ad, Roman legions advanced to the Danube. By the second century, 20,000 Roman troops had been deployed along the river between Vienna and Budapest. The Romans built a military camp called Aquincum to com-mand and coordinate this long frontier. Aquincum became home to 6,000 soldiers, and civilian suburbs housing up to 10
times that number of people grew from it. In AD 106 Aquincum was made the capital of the Roman province of Lower Pannonia. As the Roman Empire crumbled, the forces of Attila the Hun besieged and captured the settlement and established a
town on the west side of the river, which they named after Attila's brother, Buda. When Attila died in AD453, the Avars overthrew the Huns and occupied the area until the 9th century.

Magyars Migrate
The Magyars date their arrivai to AD890. Their origins are a mystery, although it is thought that they carne from the area between the Volga River and the Urals. The name Magyar stuck for both the country (Magyarorsz g in Hungarian) and the lan-guage. Related tribes are thought to have travelled northwest to modem Fin-
land and Estonia. Their difficult and only distantly related tongues are classified by linguists as Finno-Ugric.
The first military leader of the Magyars, Prince Arp d, founded a dynasty that lasted more than three centuries. Prince Gza, his great-grandson, embraced Christianity, and on Christmas Day 1000, Gza's son, Istv n (Stephen) was crowned the first king of Hungary in Esztergom. King Stephen built churches and spread Christianity and was canonsed as Szent Istv n (St Stephen). A landmark of the na-tion's civilisation in these early days was the Golden Bull of 1222, spelling out the rights of nobles and commoners.
The area was invaded by Mongols, who overran the country in 1241-2. Whole towns and villages, including Buda and Pest (Budapest).

About the Author:

Author: Olindo Taravelli official site: Appartamenti, e soggiorni vacanza a Budapest



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


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