Among Turkish relics at the foot of the Zselic

Itinerary

• Starting to the right from the railway station, follow the short stretch along main road 6 until the first intersection, then turn left onto Istvánffy Miklós Street, and where the road bends right, turn left again (Szecsődi Máté Street).
• At the end of the street, turn right onto Rákóczi Ferenc Street, which leads through Zrínyi Square to the castle. You must go around the eastern wall of the castle to reach Alapi Gáspár Street via a small bridge; it leads straight out to the city limit, to main road 67 towards Kaposvár.
• Turn left here, then after about 100 meters, turn right towards Zsibót. (If you want to see the Turkish-Hungarian Friendship Park, you should travel about one and a half kilometers along Road 67, then return to the Zsibót junction.)
• Where the road takes a sharp right turn on the Zsibót vineyard, turn left, then immediately at the first opportunity turn right onto Mozsgói Road. True to its name, this road leads straight to Mozsgó as an unpaved forest cart road after leaving the vineyard.
• At Mozsgó, when you reach the asphalt road, turn right, then continue straight to leave Mozsgó.
• Soon you will reach Almáskeresztúr. On the Main Street, traveling along the left side of the Porovica Creek, the asphalt road ends at the village boundary and a dirt road leads to Ibafa. (The direction is almost unmistakable, but you need to pay attention at one place where you must turn right at the border between a wooded strip and a field – there is no other similar option.)
• In Ibafa, turn left at the church, then continue straight on the road to Almamellék.
• At Almamellék, also turn right at the church and follow the road to Szentlászló.
• Upon reaching Szentlászló, turn left onto Kossuth Lajos Street, then right at the church (Petőfi Sándor Street). After crossing Road 67, continue straight on a poor-quality asphalt road, then after passing a farmstead, follow a cart road that leads clearly all the way to Kishárságy.
• Near Kishárságy, turn left (the Zichy Castle is located about 700 meters from the junction in the village), this road leads to Somogyhárságy.
• Upon reaching Somogyhárságy, turn left in the village center towards Somogyapáti. To reach the lookout tower, you must turn right, which is about a two-kilometer detour.
• In Somogyapáti, continue straight on the Main Street towards Szigetvár.
• Upon arriving in Szigetvár, turn left onto main road 6 (Széchenyi Street) and continue straight to Zrínyi Square – from there it’s just a short roll back to the railway station.

Detailed description of the route

Szigetvár, the Turkish town

Szigetvár is primarily known to everyone for the siege and the name Zrínyi. In the Turkish world, the opponent, Suleiman I (the Magnificent), is at least as well known for having died here, and numerous Turkish relics can be discovered in the city. The first is the so-called Turkish House (or Caravanserai), the only intact Turkish residential building in Hungary from the Ottoman period. Its exact function is no longer known, but it might have been a guesthouse, caravanserai, or even a Quran school. The building is open to visitors; upstairs you can see a reconstructed Turkish home with original plaster details and characteristic donkey-arched wall niches, while downstairs display cases present calligraphy, coffee, glass, and miniature art.

The next Turkish relic is a mosque cleverly disguised as a Catholic church. Approaching the Saint Roch parish church from behind, the attentive observer will notice donkey-arched windows and the square ground plan of the nave. Ali Pasha’s mosque now serves the city's Christian congregation, slightly altered and extended with a church tower, but Ottoman architectural features remain visible inside, such as stalactite decorations on the corners. After the capture of Szigetvár, the Janissary commander Müezzinzade Ali began constructing the mosque, where Muslim worship took place for a hundred years until the recapture of Szigetvár. Before its consecration as a Catholic church, the mosque was used as a gunpowder magazine.

The third Turkish relic is also a mosque found in the castle famous for the 1566 battle and Zrínyi’s sortie. Suleiman the Magnificent, marching against Habsburg Maximilian, was held back by Miklós Zrínyi (Nikola Šubić Zrinski), the Croat captain of the castle, despite overwhelming odds. The siege lasted one month (first the new town fell, then the old town became untenable, forcing the small defending force to retreat to the castle), causing 25,000 casualties on the Turkish side and 2,300 on the Hungarian side. The sultan died on September 6 during the siege but his death was only communicated to the besieging forces much later. Seeing the hopeless situation, Zrínyi led a breakout on September 8 with a few hundred soldiers; all but three soldiers died on the battlefield. He has been revered as a hero since in both Hungary and Croatia.

The castle took its current form during the Turkish era and still exhibits characteristics of 16th-century earthwork forts. Entering the courtyard through the gate, in the center stands Suleiman’s mosque, surrounded by the "Andrássy Castle" (called a castle colloquially though it is a substantially extended ground-floor, veranda-type peasant house connected to the Andrássy family between the World Wars). The castle now houses a museum whose permanent exhibition covers the history of the castle and city and the era of the Turkish-Hungarian wars.

Leaving the castle, we head out of the city behind the bath. For relaxing tired muscles after the route, the bath complex is perfect, featuring a summer thermal bath, swimming pool, thermal pools, adventure pool, and spa services – but now, off to the Zselic! At the border of Szigetvár, the line of Turkish relics continues. The Hungarian-Turkish Friendship Park was established in 1994 on the 500th anniversary of the birth of Suleiman the Magnificent by Turkish initiative and funding. The location was not chosen by chance: the sultan, reigning from 1520 for 46 years, lost his life during the siege of Szigetvár, one of only two Ottoman dynasty rulers who died outside of Turkey. Tradition says the well-kept park stands on the site of the Turkish commander’s tent; visitors are welcomed by two huge bronze busts of the former adversaries, a stylized türbe, and an oriental-style well.

The Türbe of Turbéki

Another tradition holds that the türbe of the sultan was once located where the Turbéki chapel now stands (which was a religious center from the 18th century for the Zselic’s German, the neighboring Hungarian, Szigetvár’s Bosnian, and the Dráva region’s Croatian populations). We pass the small chapel along the road to Zsibót – at first flat then gently uphill – on whose wall appears a Turkish-language plaque stating the now-disproved theory. However, the real burial site did not require going far to find. A 2013 excavation identified a 3-4 hectare Ottoman-period ruin site on the Turbéki vineyard, uncovering the likely burial place of the sultan and the remains of a related dervish monastery and pilgrimage settlement surroundings. The vineyard is a quiet and atmospheric outskirts of Szigetvár with weekend houses, vineyards, and orchards; we ride along a continuously ascending asphalt road, which changes gradually into forest and then a wide cart road leading to Mozsgó, where next to the football field lies the spring called Szentkút. Originally, water was drawn from this spring, where once stood a statue of Mary; since renovation in 2001, water flows over a carved rock guarded by a relief of the Virgin Mary with Child.

In the village stands a castle (now operating as a social home, but previously a college and tractor driving school), which already had an 18th-century predecessor in the form of a large manor. The latter was demolished by the Biedermann family, owners of the area from the mid-19th century, who built a building fitting their needs. Designed by Ödön Lechner, the castle’s former glory has faded (for example, Zsolnay decorative tiles are nowhere to be found on the roof), as has the castle park’s, once featuring a decorative pond. The small lake, once bordered by a bathhouse and swan house, and connected to the shore by a so-called Japanese bridge over a central island, still exists. The park’s charm is further enhanced even in dilapidated condition by the family burial chapel near the fence, visible from the street, resembling Romanesque churches styles with Carrara marble columns, bronze gates, and frescoes, a true little jewel box.

From Almáskeresztúr, we pedal onwards on a low-traffic asphalt road, unsurprisingly because you enter a cul-de-sac village after a few kilometers. The stream dividing the village’s main street lends a pleasant atmosphere; leaving towards Ibafa on a dirt road next to the cemetery. This cart road—with a tough uphill section that challenges cyclists—was once marked by a yellow tourist sign leading to the neighboring village, though those signs are mostly missing today and it is advisable to rely on maps for this section (only at one point must you consider the direction carefully: at a junction between a field and a wooded area, turn right).

The Ibafa priest’s pipe and the Zselic narrow-gauge railway

Ibafa is best known for its wooden pipe, honored with a small museum beside the church. Beautifully carved meerschaum pipes, so-called "fake meerschaum" pipes, porcelain pipes, a copy of the "Ibafa wooden pipe," tobacco containers, fire starters, various ceramic pipes from different workshops, Chinese opium pipes, as well as various match holders and pipe stems are displayed. Visitors should not miss hearing the song for which the village is famous: "The Ibafa priest has a wooden pipe, therefore the Ibafa priest’s pipe is a priest’s wooden pipe."

A quiet little road winds to neighboring Almamellék; the first building you encounter in the village is a neatly renovated station building. On November 9, 1900, the Kaposvár-Szigetvár railway line was opened to traffic, with Almamellék as one of its stations—the last train ran on December 31, 1976, on the track cutting through the Zselic. Fortunately, the connected narrow-gauge railway (the “Zselic puffing”) has survived and still operates to the delight of visitors, departing from the former station building. Inside the station building is a small exhibition about the forest railway, open on days when the small trains run.

In the village, turn right at the church; from here, partly asphalt and partly dozer road leads to Szentlászló, passing Almamellék’s cemetery with many old gravestones arranged militarily near the farther fence. In Szentlászló, also turn right at the church and, after crossing Road 67, proceed along a poor-quality asphalt road towards Kishárságy. The asphalt road turns to a cart road near a farmstead, which you must follow without turning off it. In Kishárságy, the Zichy Castle stands in the village center; the restrained building is currently unused and appears abandoned after a long period.

Lookout at the cellar row

Our route continues towards Somogyhárságy, where it’s worth making a detour towards the cemetery, where a small lookout beside the atmospheric cellar row invites a brief stop (though first you have to climb some elevation). From the small lookout, you can overlook the slopes of the Zselic; to the east, you can see the Mecsek massif; to the south, beyond the Dráva plain, the Papuk mountain range stretching from Daruvar to Diakovar in Croatian Slavonia. Opposite the lookout, an interesting round crypt known locally as the Festetics Mausoleum stands in the village cemetery.

To reach Szigetvár, you must continue cycling through Somogyviszló and Somogyapáti (where the second-largest reservoir in South Transdanubia, best known today as a fish pond, lies near the border), to arrive in the city, the end point of our route. You cross Zrínyi Square again (the former mosque’s orientation strikingly differs from the other buildings), then roll along József Attila Street, where you should closely examine a distinctive building before relaxing in the bath.

The Vigadó building bears the signature of Imre Makovecz, who said of his work: “This was great enjoyment for me, not only because I packed everything I learned in the profession into this cultural house (…) This house is one of the peaks of my professional activity, including all elements I have ever found, and even a uniquely childish surrealism.” This latter element is reinforced by the statue of Miklós Zrínyi in front of the building, which decisively points the way for passersby, in slight contrast to the tower-like block surrounding the Vigadó.