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A good example of this is Sümeg where today’s baroque town centre is the legacy of Bishop György Széchenyi who had the town surrounded by a stone wall. A part of the stone wall of a length of 1100 meters at the time and fortified with bastions still exists and within these walls was built the so-called patrician town centre during the 18th century. On the east it is bordered by the steep slopes of the Castle Hill and a Franciscan church and monastery built after 1649 and expanded significantly between 1724 and 1733, as well as the episcopal palace of Márton Padányi Bíró, Bishop of Veszprém built between 1748 and 1753 and standing in the centre of the town. This is surrounded in the a form of a semicircle with the city centre embodied by only two small streets and three squares. This is also where the house of the poet Sándor Kisfaludy (1772-1844), who was born here and lived here until his death, is situated. His poems made the whole country excited about his love for her wife Róza Szegedy.
Vince Ramasetter (1806-1878), known as the “Blue Dyer” by the locals, was also born in Sümeg, but only a few know that he was the one who prepared the success not only of the wines of Sümeg, that he was anyway a fan of, but also of Hungarian wines in general outside Hungary since Ramasetter was to first in the neighbourhood to start trading in Hungarian wines and earned a significant part of his wealth on this.
The Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49 did not affect Balaton-felvidék and luckily the land also escaped industrialization later on. Regular geographical research of the region began in 1874 and the Balaton Monograph compiled by Lajos Lóczy is still relevant in many respects.
The very thought of the number of studies on draining Lake Balaton for agricultural purposes is a nightmare, but fortunately none of these ideas were realized. Today if one visits this wine region he may well chance upon innumerable sights to see, but this is unfortunately really by chance since the sunlit waterfront dims the marvels laying behind. For example Káli Basin is an unknown land to many tourists, there are only a few people who have ever heard of the stone fields that would well worth our amazement. But who would be interested in a – some say – fossilized seashore sandpit where certain people, with some imagination, claim to see even the undulation! A description at the end of the past century depicts it as follows:
a curved hill lays along the entire village in the form of a downward trough, which is so fully packed with huge stones that, from afar, it looks as if a herd of white cattle were lying on its slopes.
Some houses were entirely built on a rock in a way that the rock can be seen underneath the walls of the building and inside the house some corners of it are also visible in the wall. The best place to observe these is at Szentbékálla but the basin hosts several other stone fields elsewhere too. True enough these are all smaller, since the witty locals used to take away the stones to use them as millstones. The moorlands on the area treasure outstanding botanical values. The country’s largest population of bird's-eye primroses grow on Sásdi meadow on the west of Köveskál. This Arctic-alpine primrose thrives only on cool areas rich in moisture. In 1982 nature protection authorities implemented a habitat restoration programme by installing a system of wooden lockage to avoid drying out of the meadow, thus the heraldic plant of the National Park was saved.
You can read more about the Balaton-felvidék in the third part of this article.
