Viva! Szeged Borfesztival: Drinking Party the Whole Week

This picture has been taken by Imre Bodo.

I am not drunkard, but I love wine.

The famous lines in the traditional Hungarian song that says,”

Meg azt mondjak reszeges vagyok pedig en a jobort szeretem nagyon…….

Even if you are drunkard or not or just a social drinker, the Szeged Bor/Wine festival is for you. I really don’t drink any alcoholic beverages, but during the one-week festival starts from May 18 to 27, I really give in to that. The aroma of wine, brandy and whisky is on the air. You can’t stop your self from tasting them.

We arrived at Szeged bus station on May 25, Friday at exactly 10:08 in the morning. We visited the huge fruit and vegetable market nearby. Suddenly, we received a message from my husband’s cousin, Iren Pinter that she was in the bus station waiting for us. We don’t know exactly how she will look like because they never meet for long time. To my surprise, Tibor and Iren just hugged and recognized each other at their first glimpse.

We went home and had a welcome wine drinks with her, Imre and Iren’s mom, Julis (We call her Julisnenya.). Welcome drink with Tokay wine is their tradition in welcoming their guests. They actually cheer saying “ egeszsegedre”.

After having lunch, we went down to the city and going around the center to see how beautiful Szeged was. You could see people dancing and some were playing the traditional instruments and others were of course selling food and wine.

The buildings are immaculately beautiful. They had been built more than centuries now. According to my husband, Tibor, these buildings were used to be palaces in Hungary. Not only buildings, we saw also some mural paintings, which were beautifully made to depict the history of the country.

Szeged is not only famous with their Wine Festival, but they also well known with their famous land mark, The Szeged Church that has Two tall and huge towers. Believe me or not, but we did climb up on one of these towers just to see the view of the city at night .It takes 10 minutes to go up and down, but it’s worth it because we had seen the pictures taken around 1980s when the Tisza river which overflowed that damaged millions of properties. Going that way made us feel mercy to them who lost their houses. After feeling sad, the mood changed when we got to the top. It feels good, while looking the down the huge crowd during the night rock concert. 

The party is not yet over. We actually witnessed the fireworks display during the last day of the festival that was lasted for 10 minutes together with the Hungarian classical live band. In fact, Tibor and I were dancing in the middle of the crowd. When the concert was over, Iren’s friends and us went to another venue to drink another wine again. It’s really fun that we had 3 days and nights drinking only wine.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am not really drunkard, but I really love the sweet Tokay wine. It is sweet, but it’s very strong. After drinking one shot given by Iren’s friend Tibor, I felt a bit tipsy. Like the wine festival or they called “ Szeged Borfesztival is sweet, but strong. After we enjoyed the sweet moment of the festival, we were so much tired that we slept as soon as we hit the pillow. But then, it was a great experience to meet new friends and experience new culture and history here at Szeged. Thank you Iren and your friends, Imre, and Julisnenya for making this event so special and memorable.