ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE

In his Divine Comedy ,Dante Alighieri passes through the gate of Hell on which there is an inscription that ends with 'Abandon hope all ye who enter here'.

That thought crossed my mind a few minutes after I sat down at a table inside Cezar Pince. 

 I first tried a Chardonnay which was served only moderately cool.  One sip was enough.  Harsh ‘grapey’ swill.

I sought out what I thought was the best wine on the menu, a 2013 kekfrankos from a well known Sopron winery.  It almost equaled the Chardonnay as a tawdry excuse for executing helpless grapes!

Did this place have a couple of leftover vats of wine from the Soviet era?

I paid and left the barely touched glasses on the table.

But just as Dante emerged from the nine circles of Hades, I too emerged from Cezar and back onto the streets of Sopron.  The ‘S’ is pronounced sh as in show by the way. 

It is a beautiful city studded with baroque architecture, churches, monuments, bakeries, ice cream shops, and outdoor cafes where people linger for hours over coffee or milkshakes.  Take a look of a few of my photos below.

Here are the bar stools as Papa Joes.  I wonder if there is a bar somewhere in Texas that looks like this.

For the history buffs, here is a brief synopsis of its history:

The site was inhabited by different tribal folk for several centuries BC.  About the year 1 or 2 construction of a Roman city began.  Actually, some think it was 14 or 15.   However, let’s not quibble over a few years one way or the other.

It was not fortified, just a place for retired soldiers and regular folk to make a living.  The main city square of modern day Sopron sits where the Roman forum was located.

By the 9^th century when the Hungarians showed up, the city had been abandoned and lay in ruins.  They began to build the city on the site of the former Roman city.  You can see a few vestiges of Roman ruin as you stroll about the city today.  The city square sits atop the site where the Roman forum used to be.

Around the year 1000 the Hungarians built a castle and then proceeded to build fortified walls around it.  It seemed like a good idea at the time but it became a centuries long white elephant.  The cost of upkeep kept them cash strapped off and on.  To make matters worse, for all those years not many other countries seemed very interested in capturing the city.

So, for the next several centuries the castle went from disrepair to repair back and forth again because they kept running short of funds to keep the darned thing fixed up.

Finally this problem was resolved in 1676 when the castle burned down taking a number of surrounding houses with it.  It makes me wonder if that was a form of medieval urban renewal by a crafty government official.

What a beautiful town arose from the ashes.  It oozes charm at the turn of every corner.   As you can see from the pictures above baroque architecture abounds.  Narrow streets turn lazily this way and that.  The cobble stone streets add the finishing touch.

As you might guess with all these restaurants, outdoor cafes, nice hotels, ice cream parlors and bakeries, tourism is the engine that drives Sopron.