Where the soul returns home – the Pentecost Grove in Tihany

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Pünkösdi Liget Tihanyi Bencés Apátság TOURINFORM TIHANY

Have you ever felt that there are places where the song of the past is sung? That there are places that attract the soul like a magnet? Perhaps because of their cultural, historical embeddedness, perhaps because of a childhood experience, perhaps their smell, sight, and atmosphere rhyme with us, with our current self, with the collective ancestor living within us. Stumbling into such places is almost a sacred moment.

Seeing Tihany, arriving there and returning is magical – perhaps because it is an infinitely and heartbreakingly picturesque place in our country. The stunning peninsula extending into Lake Balaton is a real jewel box with its eye-catching landscapes, which seems to be the citadel of a lighter-footed, more serene, Mediterranean archetype of the Hungarian soul. It is as if you were looking up at a different sky here, different scents were guiding you, as if the birds were singing differently here, as if the living and created environment were more alive, more striking, more vibrant, more harmonious with each other. It is as if the soul were returning home here.

Have you ever felt at the end of a journey, that simply because of the journey you have taken, you deserve a little pampering, an extra experience? Something like this is the case when, while wandering in Tihany, you walk up to the Benedictine Abbey and, next to it, you enter the Pentecost Grove, which is actually a green labyrinth. It is no coincidence that the young team of the Pagony Landscape and Garden Design Office, under the direction of lead designer Ágnes Herczeg, created a labyrinth – in our case, perhaps more of a pathfinder – right next to a monastery of historical significance, a Hungarian language memorial site. The symbolic yew path is a Mediterranean metaphor for your human search for a way: “lost” in it, a spiritual experience awaits you, which is further enhanced by the sight of the blue of Lake Balaton hugging the steep roof on both sides on the circumference of the labyrinth, into which the terraced hillside almost falls.

The Pentecost Grove was dreamed up by Father Emeritus Richárd Korzenszky: he wanted a calm, peaceful place where the miracle of Creator surrounds us, “...and where one walks in silence, seeing the reflection of the sparkling water, which merges with the endless blue sky”. The name is no coincidence: in honour of one of the greatest holidays of Christianity, the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, this environment built of green plants and natural stones is an island of love, acceptance, peace, and listening. The words peace and light appearing in many languages on the opening signs introduce the visitor to the green labyrinth studded with limestone steles (stone tablets with engraved signs or inscriptions), which is bordered by planted plant compositions, flower wonders, lavender islands, magnificent sedum bushes, and giant ornamental bulbous flowers. During your walk, you are stopped by stone tablets, each with quotes: about culture, homeland, language – which “...is evergreen land, blue sky, our companion on wanderings” (Sándor Kányádi). In the middle of one of the two-way labyrinths, a living tree stands, connecting the certain evergreen land with the blue sky, and in the middle of the other one, a stone composition evokes Dürer's engraving, Melancholy, hiding a well looking out through which Lake Balaton opens up before us in both directions.

To imagine, to feel

This place is romantic, sacred and timeless at the same time. Nothing here is old and nothing is modern. Everything here fits in with the landscape, the neighbouring abbey, Tihany, and Lake Balaton. Meanwhile, every corner of this otherwise impressive work of art has been designed and thought out with amazing awareness and precision, in which you can simultaneously feel an attraction towards the earth and the sky while wandering around. Bending down, you can stroke the silky maidenhair fern and think that those who planted these plants knelt just like the believer in the house of God.

Saint Elizabeth said: “Sometimes we also have to bow down and humble ourselves, so that we can then rise with confidence and joy.” Whoever cultivates, builds, or plans a garden bends down to the ground in order to then direct their gaze – and our gaze – towards the sky.

The song of the past is sung in the Pentecost Grove. But only because nostalgia, the grasping of beauty, is somehow connected in us with the lost charm of the past. The Pentecost Grove is the future. Decades, centuries from now, others will follow in your footsteps, and the yew trees, the herbs, the steles will enchant them too. This green labyrinth is the timeless beauty of both the creator and the created. An earthly paradise from which you hardly want to leave. You would stay.