Archbishop's Lyceum

The Archbishop's Lyceum is one of the grandest eighteenth-century buildings in Hungary, an enormous Baroque palace constructed between 1765 and 1785 as a university and seminary. The building now houses Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, and two of its rooms are open to visitors: the great library and the observatory-camera obscura on the sixth floor.

The library is outstanding — a two-storey hall of carved wooden bookcases topped by a ceiling fresco depicting the Council of Trent, one of the largest ceiling paintings in Hungary. The observatory above contains instruments from the eighteenth century and the camera obscura, which uses mirrors and a lens to project a live image of the city onto a table in a darkened room. It is a charming piece of Enlightenment technology. The Lyceum faces the cathedral across Eger's main axis and the two buildings together define the monumental scale of the city's historic centre.

things to do sight architecture museum
A story
The Lyceum's eighteenth-century library contains approximately 140,000 volumes and is decorated with a ceiling fresco by the Bohemian painter Johann Lucas Kracker depicting the Council of Trent — a scene of 132 figures, completed in 1778, that fills the entire vault of the reading room. A hidden bookcase in one corner conceals a door. The building also contains a camera obscura on the sixth floor that projects a real-time image of the city onto a table — installed in 1776, it is one of the earliest in Europe and still works.