Exhibition at the Ópusztaszer National Historical Memorial Park
In 2026, Hungarians will commemorate the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Mohács, which led to the collapse of the unified Kingdom of Hungary, then already more than half a millennium old. Following the death of King Louis II, a struggle began for control of the country between the Habsburg king Ferdinand I and the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman I. The latter supported the Hungarian John Zápolya—who also considered himself the legitimate ruler of Hungary—until his death, while twice attempting (in 1529 and 1532) to capture Vienna, the Austrian center of the Habsburg Empire. After Zápolya’s death, Sultan Suleiman occupied the castle and city of Buda, the former center of the kingdom, leaving the eastern province of Transylvania to the king’s son (1541).
To secure Buda, the Ottomans sought to establish a defensive zone along the Danube, successively capturing major fortresses and cities, including Székesfehérvár, the coronation city of the Hungarian kings, and Esztergom, the center of Hungarian Catholic Christianity and former capital of the kingdom. On the largely flat Great Plain between the Danube and Tisza rivers—covered mainly by river sand—there were no significant fortresses except for the castle of the Archbishop of Kalocsa at Bács. Therefore, the Ottomans had to build their own fortifications if they wished to secure their conquests.
Szeged, located on the banks of the Tisza, fell into Ottoman hands without resistance at the end of 1542. Between 1548 and 1552, the occupiers constructed a fortress in the center of the populous royal town by reusing earlier urban fortifications and building materials taken from abandoned and demolished churches. Although the Hungarians, led by the former chief magistrate of Szeged, attempted to recapture it, their effort ended in failure.
Over the following two decades, the Ottomans built a series of palisade forts along the Danube (Szentkirály, Jankovac, Madaras, Baja, and Zombor) and the Tisza (Csongrád, Tömörkény, Szer, and Martonos) to protect roads and especially river crossings. Some of these forts have still not been located, while others have been identified through aerial photography and are currently being investigated with geophysical methods. The core of these palisade forts was usually an earlier structure, most often a church. Their walls were formed by rows of stakes woven together with branches and coated inside and out with clay to prevent accidental or deliberate fire. These forts housed between fifty and one hundred soldiers, who frequently clashed with cavalry from fortresses located two to three hundred kilometers away—such as Gyula, Szigetvár, and Eger, and later chiefly Fülek—which penetrated deep into nominally Ottoman-held territory to collect taxes.
Although the region between the Danube and Tisza had become a hinterland, the occupiers were never completely secure there. For this reason, Muslim civilian populations settled only in fortified towns such as Bács, Szeged, and Szolnok, though they were far outnumbered by immigrants from various Balkan peoples. In the early years of the occupation, Christian churches were used as mosques, but later purpose-built Islamic religious buildings were erected according to Ottoman architectural principles rooted in Byzantine traditions. Since Islam prescribed regular ritual cleansing, steam baths were established in all three towns mentioned above. Of these, only the bath in Bács still preserves standing walls. After the expulsion of the Ottomans, these structures disappeared relatively quickly, and even the Turkish cemeteries left almost no trace. Nevertheless, a türbe (mausoleum) still stood in the northern part of Szeged during the 1730s and continued to attract Muslim pilgrims.
When the Ottoman army advanced as far as Buda in 1526, it crossed the Danube and, upon retreating southward through the Danube–Tisza Interfluve, split into two columns. Cavalry units spread out in all directions, devastating hundreds of settlements and carrying off thousands of captives and livestock. The refugees who gathered between the city of Bács and the Danube may have outnumbered the participants in the Battle of Mohács itself; their camp was destroyed following a formal siege. The Hungarian population suffered severe losses between the Danube and Tisza already at this time, and much of the southern region, Bácska, remained deserted. In occupied areas, Hungarians were pushed into the suburbs. In the northern part of the Danube–Tisza Interfluve they remained the majority population, but they virtually disappeared from the southern half of the region. There, settlements of South Slavs—referred to in contemporary sources as Rács—who often led a semi-nomadic lifestyle, became predominant. Their material culture, including magnificent women’s jewelry, is known in part from their cemeteries.
Szeged remained predominantly Hungarian because its population withdrew to the southern suburb (today’s Alsóváros), while the Franciscan friars of the local monastery preserved Catholic traditions. The monastery safeguarded several medieval artifacts, including a fifteenth-century armchair belonging to James of the Marches and a chasuble made from a cloak donated to St. Demetrius Church during King Matthias Corvinus’s visit in 1475. The Franciscans frequently petitioned Ottoman authorities for permission to repair their church and monastery, carefully preserving the permits they received—some issued directly by the Sultan himself. Local judges (kadis) authenticated such documents with seals, and an Ottoman seal discovered by a metal detector is also displayed in the exhibition.
Excavations in Szeged have also uncovered pottery commonly described as “Turkish” but actually more characteristic of the Balkans. These finds include pedestal bowls, spouted jugs, baking bells that were already considered archaic in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, shallow dishes, and pebble-tempered cooking pots often referred to by archaeologists as “Bosnian.” The exhibition also displays imported ceramics, including faience produced near İznik in Asia Minor and fragments of Chinese porcelain. Following the spread of tobacco smoking in the sixteenth century, pipes of various colors and decorations were manufactured, some even bearing inscriptions. Domestic material culture included candlesticks, which in medieval Hungary were often made of brass or bronze, while the tulip-shaped candleholder is particularly characteristic of the Ottoman period. Ottoman leatherworking was highly developed and influenced Hungarian culture, as reflected in numerous loanwords. Archaeologists have even uncovered a tannery workshop from this period within the fortress of Szeged, despite the strong odors associated with leather processing.
The exhibited artifacts come from the Hungarian National Museum, the Csongrád County Archives of the Hungarian National Archives, the József Katona Museum in Kecskemét, and the Ferenc Móra Museum in Szeged. The exhibition was supported by the Message of Szer Foundation.
