Hungary: Pannonhalma Archabbey – A Thousand Years of Faith

I do like a monastery that’s been minding its own business for over a thousand years, and Pannonhalma, plonked on its hill in western Hungary not far from Győr, was exactly that sort of place. I’d read that it was a UNESCO World Heritage Site, which these days can mean anything from genuinely astonishing to a car park with a plaque, but I needn’t have worried. This one earned its keep.

The monks arrived in 996, which even by the standards of old European institutions is going some. That’s the year Benedictine monks, sent out under the patronage of the ruling Árpád dynasty, established themselves on this particular hill and got on with the business of praying, farming and generally being one of the more stubborn outposts of Christian Europe. A few years later, in 1001, King Stephen I — later canonised as Saint Stephen, and the chap generally credited with turning Hungary into a proper Christian kingdom rather than a loose federation of tribes who were rather fond of raiding their neighbours — issued the abbey’s founding charter. That document still exists, tucked away in the abbey’s archive, and it’s considered one of the oldest surviving pieces of writing to include Hungarian words at all, buried in among the Latin. I find that sort of thing quietly thrilling, in the way that only a certain kind of middle-aged Englishman finds a very old bit of parchment thrilling.

There’s also a rather nice bit of local mythology attached to the hill itself. Pannonhalma means, roughly, “Hungarian Holy Mountain,” and the monks who settled there in the tenth century believed — rightly or wrongly, and I suspect nobody will ever really know — that it stood near the birthplace of St Martin of Tours, the fourth-century Roman soldier turned bishop who famously cut his cloak in half to share with a beggar. Martin was born in the Roman province of Pannonia, which covered this part of what’s now western Hungary, so the connection isn’t entirely fanciful. Either way, the abbey has carried his name alongside its own for the best part of a millennium, and you still see references to it as the Archabbey of Pannonhalma dedicated to St Martin, which is a lot of dedication for one building.

What struck me, wandering up the hill towards the complex, was how the whole thing has simply accumulated over time, rather like a very grand and holy compost heap. There’s Romanesque work from the twelfth century, when the original church was expanded and rebuilt after a fire had done for the first version. There’s Gothic cloistering from the following couple of centuries. And then, because nobody in Central Europe could resist a bit of Baroque flourish once the fashion arrived, there are Baroque additions layered on top of all that, followed by a proper neoclassical facelift to the basilica’s front in the 1830s, courtesy of the architect János Packh, who by all accounts gave the old building a smart new Classicist face while leaving the medieval bones largely intact behind it. It’s the architectural equivalent of an old English country house that’s been added to by every generation since the Tudors — nobody quite matches, but somehow it all hangs together.

I should confess, in the interests of full disclosure and the sort of honesty my wife tells me is not always my strong suit, that I rather cocked up my visit. The main bulk of the abbey — the cloisters, the refectory, the cellars, and various bits I’m told are genuinely worth seeing — are only accessible on a guided tour, and I decided, for reasons that felt sound at the time and now feel merely lazy, not to join one. This left me with just the basilica and the library. As consolation prizes go, however, it turned out to be a rather good one, and I shan’t pretend otherwise.

The basilica itself rather surprised me. Given the scale of the hilltop setting and the general air of monastic grandeur that surrounds the place, I’d built up an expectation of something vast and gilded, all soaring vaults and gold leaf glinting menacingly from every surface, in the manner of half the Baroque churches you stumble into across Central Europe. What I got instead was considerably smaller and a good deal calmer — pale stone, restrained decoration, nothing shouting for attention. It felt like a proper working church rather than a monument built to impress passing tourists, which I suppose is exactly what it is: the monks who founded it in 996 were there to worship, not to put on a show, and a thousand years on that sense hadn’t entirely worn off. There’s a crypt below as well, dating from the earliest phase of the building, which has that particular hush that old crypts have — the sort of quiet that makes you lower your voice without quite meaning to.

The library, though, was the real business, and I’m not ashamed to say it’s the sort of room that makes me go a bit soft in the head. It was built in the early nineteenth century, between roughly 1824 and 1836, in a grand Classicist style to house a collection that had been growing since the abbey’s earliest days, and it now holds somewhere north of 400,000 volumes, making it one of Hungary’s most significant libraries outside Budapest. It’s arranged over multiple levels, reached by narrow spiral staircases tucked into the corners, with wooden galleries running round the upper floors and a ceiling fresco overhead doing the sort of dramatic swirling thing that ceiling frescoes always do. The shelving is dark, carved wood, packed tight with leather-bound volumes whose spines have faded to that particular gold-on-brown that only genuinely old books manage, and the whole room smells exactly as an old library ought to smell, which is to say of dust, leather and quiet self-importance.

Buried somewhere in that archive, incidentally, is a document called the Tihany Abbey Foundation Charter, dating from 1055, which contains the oldest surviving continuous passage of written Hungarian anywhere — a few dozen words slipped in among the Latin, describing a boundary near a lake. It isn’t the sort of thing you can just wander up and inspect on a casual visit, and I certainly didn’t get anywhere near it, but knowing it was in the building somewhere added a nice frisson to standing among all those shelves. There’s something about being in the presence of the oldest known version of a language, even at several rooms’ remove, that I found unexpectedly moving, in a way I wasn’t quite prepared for and am slightly embarrassed to admit.

It’s worth saying, too, that Pannonhalma hasn’t simply survived by being left alone in a quiet corner of Europe, which would have been the easy way to rack up a thousand years. It went through the Ottoman period, when much of Hungary was under Turkish control and plenty of religious houses were suppressed or destroyed outright. It went through the Habsburg era, with all its administrative meddling. And it went through the communist period after 1945, when the state closed down the vast majority of Hungary’s monasteries and expelled the religious orders running them — Pannonhalma was one of a small handful allowed to continue functioning, on the condition that it kept running its famous secondary school, the gimnázium, which it still does today. It’s rather remarkable, when you think about it, that an institution founded by tenth-century monks not only weathered Ottoman invasion and Habsburg bureaucracy but also managed to talk its way past a Marxist-Leninist government that wasn’t, on the whole, terribly fond of monasteries. UNESCO recognised the whole complex as a World Heritage Site in 1996, fittingly enough exactly one thousand years after the monks first arrived, which is the kind of neat historical bow that real life doesn’t often tie for you.

These days the abbey also runs a working vineyard and winery on the surrounding slopes, along with a herb garden and a lavender field that draws its own stream of visitors in early summer, none of which I saw, having arrived at entirely the wrong time of year and having, as previously confessed, skipped the tour that would presumably have taken me past all of it. Something for next time, then, along with the actual guided tour itself, which I fully intend to do properly on a return visit, assuming I can summon the energy.