Timisoara is an unusual city. Fate gave it a series of stops and starts. Visitors can start to understand centuries of troubled history from across the entire Carpatian Basin just by spending a little time in a single city.
This is where the rule of the Hungarian Anjou dynasty began and Róber Károly had his royal seat in a 14th century. Central Europe's largest mediaeval peasant uprising ended here in 1514, leading to horrific death on a red-hot iron throne for rebel leader György Dózsa, as described by many poets. The gentle Banat region was the last area freed from Turkish domination, said to have lasted 150 years in Hungarian history books, through the Turks ruled for 164 years here. This led to the region being repopulated and incoming Catholic Austrians and Germans started to refer to Timisoara as "Little Vienna".
Centuries of troubled and bloody history don't weigh heavily on visitors to the city, though. Timisoara is a large, lively, cheerful city, a strange combination of Byzantine eastern atmosphere and newer western culture. Just take a short walk in the huge city centre square, renamed Victory Square after 1989. dominated at one end by a redbrick Orthodox cathedral built in the 30s and 40s, the other end contains the slightly lopsided, yet still spectacular Opera House.
But both sides of the square are defined by the atmosphere of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries - developing bourgeois society in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy architecture harking back to a richer, more confident world. Nobody knew that war and reorganisation of borders were just around the corner, so a lot of houses were built, some of them in fine Secessionist style. The shape of Timisoara was also defined by the turn of the century, as there are no alleys, winding streets or charmingly chaotic little squares. The inner city is defined and crossed by boulevards and avenues, and has a regular shape, just like Szeged, the relatively nearby market town on the Great Hungarian Plain, which also enjoyed its golden age at the turn of the century.
Visitors only need to have a good look round the main square to get a sense of different eras, styles, atmosphere and stories of regions and cultures coming together here, but neither visitors nor city residents feel the weight of history. A long space full of trees and flowers provides a favourite walk for the people of Timisoara and attentive visitors can learn an awful lot about the essence of the place simply by being there, watching and listening to city residents. Naturally, Romanian is the most common language on the walk. But within a few minutes, you are bound to hear Hungarian, Serbian and German too. And maybe not from tourists. It could just as well be local-born residents of the city speaking these languages. The areas of Banat and Timisoara, located where 3 countries meet, have been a model of relatively peaceful coexistence of Hungarian, Romanian, Serbian, German and Jewish culture and languages for centuries.
History plays hide and seek in Timisoara, as do mediaeval city walls that sometimes emerge among modern buildings. Hunyadi Palace guards the remains of the former castle, but the region's archaeological relics (there was a Roman settlement in Timisoara) can also be seen in the Banat Museum, a result of 19th-century reconstruction and extensions. Maybe the old city hall is the most intact Baroque architectural relic of the 18th century, along with the prince's palace of Jenő Savoyai, who successfully waged war on the Turks. Unity Square evokes Habsburg style and architecture, with an outstanding example of this style provided by the richly-decorated monument of Nepmuki St. János in Freedom Square. Though the city has a Greek Catholic church and working synagogue, this church definitely deserves a special mention - from the outside it hardly attracts the attention of tourists and doesn't really figure in guidebooks. The reformed church and presbytery where part of a large residential building, and because the Timisoara congregation still did not fell strong enough to sustain a separate church by the end of the 19th century, the parish priest decided to have a temporary church built in a block of flats and the building supported the congregation. This strange church, consecrated in October 1902 and now 100 years old, remains one of the main centres for Reformism in the city today.
Timisoara has held onto its variety to provide an image of a bright, calm, developing city, with many fine restaurants, hotels with international flags, parks, near the Bega Canal. New factories, shopping centres, and car showrooms of steel and glass in the city suburbs all continue the Timisoara story.