DETUROPE - The Central European Journal of Regional Development and Tourism 2024, 16(3):9-35 | DOI: 10.32725/det.2024.009

Pécs and the Balkans - higher education functions

Norbert Pap^a,, Marianna Ács^b

a Professor, University of Pécs, Faculty of Sciences, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, 7634 Pécs, Ifjúság útja 6. University of Pécs, Szentágothai Research Centre, Historical and Political Geograpahy Research Centrum, 7634 Pécs, Ifjúság útja 20.

b University of Pécs, Faculty of Humanities, Institute of Education, 7634 Pécs, Ifjúság útja 6.

Pécs is a Hungarian city in the country's south, close to the Croatian border. To define it as the gateway to the Balkans is an overstatement, but it has some potential. As a school town, it has the role of an intellectual gateway. In the Middle Ages, the (bishop's) city developed as a spiritual and intellectual bastion of Christianity on the southeastern periphery of the West. For centuries, the Church's missionary activity in Bosnia and Bulgaria gave a role to the Franciscan and Dominican monks who ran monasteries and schools in the city.
After the Ottoman-Turkish conquest, Pécs retained its multicultural and multiconfessional denominational school town character. In addition to the school system, which taught Muslim Sufism, there was also a Christian school. The dominant narrative of the intellectual centre was the expansion of Ottoman/Muslim rule in Central Europe.
Following the anti-Ottoman reconquest, it became a homogeneous Catholic fortress, which tended to develop unilateral relations only with the West. This also homogenised the school system (although Croatian language and culture were still studied through the Croatian school). As a result of 19th century industrialisation, civil transformation and imperial ambitions, as well as aspirations in the Balkans, its orientation gradually changed and partly turned southwards again.
For most of the 20th century, relations with the southern neighbour were characterised by hostile or distant relations. The social foundations of the southern Slavic relations system began to crumble as a result of emigration and assimilation, but the development of the school system was able to compensate for this to some extent. At the end of the 20th century, geopolitical changes reopened the possibility and the need for networking in the Balkans. The horizon is the same as it was at the beginning of the process in 1009: Slavonia, Bosnia and the Balkans beyond.

Keywords: Pécs, Balkans, school town, Christian, Muslim, madrasa, university

Published: February 3, 2025  Show citation