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PRESOV |
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Capital of the Slovak Saris region and a cultural centre for the
Rusyn (Ruthenian) minority, PRESOV has a split personality indicative of
its long and chequered ethnic history. Over the past decade, it has been
treated to a wonderful face-lift, and although there's not much of
interest beyond its main square, it's a refreshingly youthful and
vibrant town, partly due to its university.
The lozenge-shaped main square, Hlavná ulica , is flanked by creamy,
pastel-coloured, almost edible eighteenth-century facades. At the
square's southern tip is the Greek-Catholic Cathedral , a wonderful
Rococo affair with a fabulously huge iconostasis. Further along, on the
same side of the square, is Presov's town hall or radnica , from whose
unsuitably small balcony Béla Kun's Hungarian Red Army declared the
short-lived Slovak Socialist Republic in 1919. Further north along the
square, the town museum , situated in the dogtooth-gabled Rákociho dom
at no. 86 (Tues-Fri 8am-noon & 12.30-4pm, Sat & Sun 11am-3pm), offers a
thorough retelling of the history of the Saris region.
Presov's Catholic and Protestant churches vie with each other at the
widest point of the square. The fourteenth-century Catholic church of sv
Mikulás has the edge, not least for its modern Moravian stained-glass
windows and its sumptuous Baroque altarpiece. Behind sv Mikulás, the
much plainer Lutheran Church , built in the mid-seventeenth century,
bears witness to the strength of religious reformism in the outer
reaches of Hungary at a time when the rest of the Habsburgs' lands were
suffering the full force of the Counter-Reformation.
Lastly, the town's ornate turn-of-the-century synagogue in the northwest
corner of the old town - access from Svermova - has been turned into a
small museum of Judaica (Múzeum Expozícia Judaík; Tues & Wed 11am-4pm,
Thurs 3-6pm, Fri 10am-1pm, Sun 1-5pm), with an exhibition on Judaism and
Presov's Jews, 6000 of whom perished in the Holocaust.
The bus and train stations are situated opposite one another about 1km
south of the main square; the best buses and trolleybuses into town are
those which stop at Na Hlavnej. The best budget accommodation is to be
had at the Sen , Vajanského 65 (tel 091/7733 170; under Ł5/$8), two
blocks east of the main square; otherwise there's the Senator , at
Hlavná 67 (tel 091/7731 186; mssh@vadium.sk ; Ł15-20/$24-32), or the
super-cheap Studentsky domov TU at Budovatelská 31 (tel 091/7723 241;
under Ł5/$8). The restaurant Leonardo at Hlavná 144, the north end of
the main square, offers Slovak and Italian alternatives, and there's a
pleasant Irish pub at Slovenská 39.
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