Architecture's sights

Though Murska Sobota was a town as early as in the Middle Ages, it began to get its urbane appearanse only in the second half of the 19th century. Before that only two building dominated the settlement. The first is the church of St. Nicholas , its kernel with the choir bell tower originates from the end oh the 13th century. The Roman building was rebuilt into a gotic plesbiterium in the 14th century, the nave with flat ceiling enlarged in the 15th century; in the next century it was arched and extended with two side chapels. In the years 1910-1912 a new church was build according to the projects of Laszlo Takacs; the old plesbyterium was included. In the plesbyterium the old gothic fresco painting of the second half of the 14th century has been preserved. The second building is the renaissance manor from the 16th century, probably standing in the place of the former medieval castle, its todays appearance dates from the first half of the 18th century. The main portal , as an example of the baroque arhtecture plastic art of extraordinary quality, the chapel and saloon , frescoed in the spirit of baroque illusionism particularty decorate the castle. There is a park with some special examples of exotic trees and more than tree hundred years old oak trees round the castle building. In the park there is the Monument to the Authors of Prekmurje and the Monoment to the Cultural Worker who last there lives during the National Liberations Struggle; in 1993 a series of stone columns-lithopunctures, the work of the sculptor Marko Pogacnik, were placed in the park, too. The main square in plans of the Russian arhitect Aromcik and the sculptores Boris and Zdenko Kalin and erected in 1945, in front of the cinema there is a monument to Stefan Kovac, the work of Miki Muster. In the cemetery there is monument to the partisans who lost their lifes in the Second World War, the former Jewish cemetery a little farther has been changed into memorial park. From the urban-arhitectural aspect Murska Sobota has been extra marked by the arhitects Laszlo Takacs with some exeptional examples of historicism and secession arhitecture, and Feri Novak with some middle-class villas and the development of the town projected according to the functionalistic principles of modern town-planning. The picture is completed with the neo-Gothic complex of the evangelist church and the Hotel Zvezda , built in 1909. Some arhitectural interventions into the town kernel have strongly changed the former appearance of a typical pannonian town during the last decade. They were the most expresive in the streets Lendavska and Kocljeva ulica and within the square between the streets Cankarjeva ulica and ulica Stefana Kovaca.