Eger is the kind of town that makes you wonder why you spent so long in the capital. I arrived by train from Budapest — two hours through increasingly gentle countryside — and stepped into a Baroque old center so compact and immaculate that it felt like someone had designed it for exactly one afternoon of wandering. A castle on the hill, an Ottoman minaret (the northernmost in Europe, and I climbed it, which involved a spiral staircase so narrow my shoulders touched both walls), a basilica that seats thousands, and cobblestone streets lined with pastel facades hiding wine cellars and thermal baths.
The castle itself held off the Ottoman siege of 1552, a story so embedded in Hungarian identity that every schoolchild knows it. Standing on the walls, looking out over the town and the vine-covered hills beyond, I could understand the attachment — this is a landscape worth defending.
The Valley of the Beautiful Women
The Szépasszonyvölgy — Valley of the Beautiful Women — is a horseshoe of wine cellars carved into the hillside just outside town. The name is better than any marketing campaign could invent, and the reality lives up to it. You walk from cellar to cellar, tasting Egri Bikavér (Bull’s Blood) and lesser-known local whites, paying a few hundred forints per glass. I spent an afternoon there that I had planned for two hours — by the fourth cellar, a winemaker named László had sat me down with a vertical tasting of his Bikavér and was explaining, with passionate hand gestures, why the 2017 was the best vintage of his career. The atmosphere is convivial, slightly chaotic, and entirely unpretentious.
Back in town, the Turkish-era thermal bath offers warm mineral pools in a setting that hasn’t changed much since the 16th century. I soaked there after the wine cellars, which is either the most logical or least logical sequence imaginable, depending on your constitution.
When to go: September and October for the grape harvest and wine festivals. Spring is lovely for exploring the castle and old town.