Pécs (German: Fünfkirchen, Croatian: Pečuh, Serbian: Печуј/Pečuj, in the Middle Ages Latin: Quinque Ecclesiae, in ancient times Latin: Sopianae) is a town in southwestern Hungary, the fifth largest settlement in the country Budapest, after Debrecen, Szeged and Miskolc. It is the largest settlement in Transdanubia. It is the capital of Baranya County and Pécs District, the centre of South Transdanubia.
In the region inhabited by Celtic and Pannonian tribes, the Romans founded a city called Sopianae at the beginning of the 2nd century. By the 4th century, the settlement had become a provincial seat and an important centre of early Christianity. The early Christian cemetery complex from this period was inscribed on the World Heritage List by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee in December 2000.[3]
The bishopric was founded in the city in 1009 by King St. Stephen, and the country's first university in 1367 by King Louis the Great. (The country's largest university still operates here, with nearly 34, students.[4]) Bishop Janus Pannonius, the great poet of Hungarian humanism and the most prominent representative of Hungarian poetry in Latin, made medieval Pécs one of the centres of the cultural and artistic life of the country.[5]
After 150 years of Turkish occupation – rich architectural monuments from this era have survived, such as the mosque of Gazi Kasim Pasha on the main square of the city – in 1780 Pécs received the rank of a free royal city from Queen Maria Theresa. Subsequently, a strong civilization and economic development began. Industrialization accelerated significantly in the first half of the 19th century, Zsolnay ceramics, Littke champagne, Angster organ became world famous.[6]
Pécs has always been a multi-ethnic settlement, cultural layers have been stacked on top of each other, traditions and values of nationalities have been combined during its two millennia of history. Hungarians, Croats and Swabians still live peacefully with each other in rich cultural polarity, so it is not surprising that the city became one of the European Capitals of Culture in 2010, together with Essen and Istanbul. The majority of the tender accepted in 2005 and announced as the winner was written by civil society, so the Pécs2010 Capital of Culture project was truly a program of Pécs. The program was built on 4 cultural investments: Pécs Conference and Concert Centre, South Transdanubian Regional Library and Knowledge Centre, Museums Street and Zsolnay Cultural Quarter. These were complemented by the revitalisation of public spaces and parks, all co-financed by the European Union. The honorary title has launched huge developments in the city. New, modern hotels,[7] shopping centre[8] and office buildings were built.[9][10]
Pécs won the UNESCO Cities for Peace Award in 1998 for its welcoming and tolerant attitude towards the refugees of the Yugoslav war.[11] The city came third in 2007 and second in 2008 at The LivCom Awards[12]) in the category of settlements with between 75,200 and inhabitants.[13]
The ancient name of Pécs is Sopianæ. The disputed origin of this Latin name (Celtic sop: "swamp") is certainly related to the fact that the southern side of the Roman town standing on the site of Pécs stretched down to the waterlogged, marshy meadow. This earlier assumption was confirmed at the time,[14] when, around 1980, during construction, archaeologists excavated the ruins of the southern part of Sopianae.[15]
The Hungarian name Pécs first appears in a document from 1235 in this form: Pechuth (i.e. "Pécs road"), then around 1290 as an independent name: Ponch villicus de Peech (with the reading Pécs).[16] The origin of the name Pécs is uncertain. Many argue that the word Pécs is etymologically identical to Vienna and Bény and means a bastion fortification. The common word peć and the toponym formed from it preserve the meaning of "furnace, stove, lonely rock" (see also: origin of the name Pest). Some people think of Turkish references, in this case the word beş arises, which means five in Turkish. If we take the word beş as a basis, it is likely that the Avar who lived there before the conquest may have come into Hungarian through the Bulgarian peoples of Volga, who also spoke Turkic languages. According to other opinions, it can go back to an Indo-European numeral name meaning "five", but its linguistic affiliation cannot be further determined. There is a town in Kosovo whose Serbian name is also Peć,
The medieval Latin name for the town was Quinque Ecclesiae (meaning "five churches"). Its earlier antecedent was the Quinque Basilicae ...
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