Subotica is a rarity – a small town full of well preserved Art Nouveau architecture.

It’s up on the border with Hungary and doesn’t get many tourists.

Novi Sad bus station was full of shiny, modern buses but the one for Subotica was a bone rattling jalopy with broken seats and no air conditioning.  It felt like sitting in a malfunctioning massage chair with your knees under your armpits for two hours.  And then the bus broke down.  It limped into a fly speck of a town 50km short of Subotica.  The driver, a quintessential stereotype of Eastern European men, glumly informed passengers to get out.

A helpful young woman interpreted for us. “Another bus will come in 30 minutes but you will have to buy another ticket”.  So much for the piece of paper otherwise known as a ticket by which the bus company contracted to take us to Subotica.   No consumer protection laws here.

Well, eventually we made it.

From the 1860s until WWI, Subotica was a commercially and strategically important outpost of the Hungarian Empire.  The city’s most prosperous years were from the late 1800s.  Art Nouveau was wildly popular all over Europe, with Vienna developing a particularly popular variant known as the Hungarian Secession style.  In a few short decades around the turn of the 20th century, Subotica embraced it with enthusiasm.

The region became part of Serbia when WWI ended, but the Hungarian influence remained strong.  Even today, about one-third of its citizens speak and identify as ethnically Hungarian.  Many signs are in Hungarian.  And remarkably, much of the Art Nouveau remains, too.

City Hall is a local icon with a 76 metre tower and 6,000 square metre footprint, four internal courtyards, a performance hall and the council offices.  But nothing stops the march of time.  There’s a McDonalds on the ground floor.

Completed in 1903 when Subotica had a large and prosperous Jewish community, Subotica Synagogue is the second largest in Europe, after the Dohany Street Synagogue in Budapest.  It is the only surviving Hungarian Art Nouveau Jewish place of worship in the world.

Almost all of Subotica’s Jews perished in the Holocaust.  Of the few who survived the war, some left for Israel or other places.  The tiny community which was left could not afford to maintain the building and it passed to the municipality in the 1970s.  It slowly decayed for years until a multi-million dollar refurbishment was completed in 2018 funded by the Serbian and Hungarian governments.  The municipality now uses it as a concert venue but also allows the small Jewish community to use it as a synagogue.

A memorial in the grounds honours the 6,000 Subotica Jews who perished in the death camps.

Many tenement palaces were built in the city centre around the turn of the 20th century.  These were buildings constructed with an opulent facade and an interior which included aristocratic apartments suitable for wealthy citizens who fancied living like royalty but didn’t quite have the title or the means.

Salamon Sonnenberg Tenement Palace was built in 1910 with plant motifs reflecting typical Hungarian folk patterns.

Vojnic Palace stands out for its distinctive shape and because it wasn’t designed by an architect but by a bricklayer from Budapest.

Time has been less kind to the tenement palace now simply called Town Tenement Palace.

The Golden Lamb Hotel looked like this in 1902, but the current building is actually a replica built in the 1980s.

The National Casino is now the City Library.

This was cute.  The Monument to the Unknown Plumber was a gift to the city by the local public utility company “in honour of all those workers who have been working on water supply of the city for over a century”.

About 10km from Subotica is Palic Lake.  It’s unusual in that it is a salt water lake nowhere near the sea.  According to local legend, a shepherd named Pavle lost his herd and cried so much his tears formed a lake.  And that’s why it’s salty.

Palic is the largest natural lake in Serbia, 5km in diameter, with a walking and cycle path around the shore.  After more than a week of temperatures in the high 30s, finally the weather cooled enough for a pleasant lakeside stroll.

There’s bean bags to plonk on, and little cafes dotted around.

In the late 1800s it became a resort and spa destination for the elite.  The Hungarian Secession architects were hard at work here too.

Being the 1800s, men and women bathed separately.  The enclosure curving around the Women’s Lido was built in 1912 to allow modest ladies to bathe out of sight of leering males.  It’s now a cafe.

We had a fine fish lunch at another of the lakeside terrace restaurants.

Back in town, we’ve saved the best for last.

One of the main designers of Subotica’s Art Nouveau beauties was Ferenc Raichle.  So popular, in fact, he was appointed City Architect.

Ironically, despite his position, he spent years fighting the planning authority for approval for his own house.  Eventually he won.  Raichle Palace looks like something out of Walt Disney, complete with ballroom, smoking lounge for men and salon for the ladies.

Sadly for him, he went bankrupt only four years later and the house was sold.  He left Subotica, never to return.  He continued working as an architect all his life, but never again reached the level of success he’d enjoyed in Subotica.    Perhaps he’d get some satisfaction from knowing his palace is now the city’s Museum of Contemporary Art, its most recognisable image, and most visitors’ favourite Subotica building.