Slovakia's Little Rome — a walled Baroque university city where the Catholic Church held its ground through 150 years of Ottoman occupation
Trnava is a compact medieval city of 65,000 in western Slovakia, 45 minutes from Bratislava by train — nicknamed 'the Little Rome of Slovakia' for its remarkable density of Baroque churches (eleven within the old town walls). It served as the seat of the Archbishop of Esztergom during the 16th–17th centuries when Hungary was under Ottoman occupation, making it the de facto religious capital of Catholic Hungary. Its university (founded 1635, now relocated to Bratislava) was one of the most important in Central Europe, and its Cathedral of St. John the Baptist remains one of the finest early Ba…
Trnava received royal town status in 1238, making it one of the oldest chartered towns in Slovakia. When the Ottomans captured Buda in 1541, the archbishopric of Esztergom — seat of Hungarian Catholicism — relocated to Trnava, which became 'the Rome of Hungary'. The Jesuits founded the university here in 1635, making it the first university in the Kingdom of Hungary. The Habsburgs eventually retook Buda in 1686, but Trnava's decade of institutional importance left an extraordinary legacy of Baroque religious architecture concentrated in a small walled city that had no reason to demolish it.