A city with county rights, Eger is best known for its medieval castle, thermal baths, baroque buildings, the northernmost Ottoman minaret, and red wines.

The town is located on the Eger Stream (a tributary of the Tisza river), on the hills between the Mátra and Bükk mountains.

One suggestion is that the place was named after the alder (égerfa in Hungarian) which grew so abundantly along the banks of the Eger Stream.

This explanation seems to be correct because the name of the town reflects its ancient natural environment, and also one of its most typical plants, the alder, large areas of which could be found everywhere on the marshy banks of the Stream although they have since disappeared.

The basin of Eger and the hilly region around it have always been very suitable for human settlements, and there are many archaeological findings from the early ages of history, which support this fact.

The other names of the town are in Latin Agria, in Serbian and Croatian Jegar / Јегар or Jegra / Јегра, in Czech and Slovene Jager, in Slovak Jáger, in Polish Eger, and in Turkish Eğri.

The natural fundamentals of the surroundings (meeting of plains and hills) made it possible to establish economic and cultural relations between the different parts of the country.

This development was blocked for a short time by the Mongol invasion in 1241, when the town was ransacked and burned down during the episcopacy of Cletus Bél.

In the autumn of 1552, Captain István Dobó and his handful of soldiers were successful in defending the fortress and northern Hungary from the expanding Turkish Empire.

The first writer of note to draw on the story was the Hungarian renaissance poet and musician Sebestyén Tinódi Lantos (c. 1510–1556), whose account may have come partly from eyewitnesses.

Géza Gárdonyi wrote his novel, "Eclipse of the Crescent Moon" in remembrance of this battle, and his work has been translated into numerous languages.

Despite the fact that István Dobó and his soldiers successfully defended the fortress, it was destroyed during the siege, so it was essential to wholly rebuild it.

While István Dobó and his soldiers managed to defend the fortress in 1552, in 1596 the captain at that time and the foreign mercenaries under his rule handed it over.

Churches were converted into mosques,[citation needed] the castle rebuilt, and other structures erected, including public baths and minarets.

The rule of the Turks in Central Hungary began to collapse after a failed Ottoman attempt to capture Vienna.

According to the ... records there were only 413 houses in the area within the town walls which were habitable and most of these were occupied by left over Turkish families.

Leopold I re-established Eger as a free royal borough in 1688, which meant that it was relieved from the ecclesiastic manorial burdens.

This state lasted until 1695, when Fenessy György [hu], the returning bishop, had the former legal status of a bishopric town restored by the monarch.

The building processes attracted many craftsman, merchants, and artists, including Kracker János Lukács, Anton Maulberts, Franz Sigrist [de], Josef Ignaz Gerl [hu], Jakab Fellner, and Henrik Fasola.

The 18th century was also important because bishop Barkóczy and Eszterházy decided to found a university in Eger patterned after the ones in Nagyszombat and in Vienna.

There were already precedents for this type of education because in 1700 Bishop István Telekessy, who took sides with Ferenc Rákóczy the Second, established a seminary in Eger.

The 19th century began with disasters: a fire that destroyed half the town in 1800, and a collapse of the south wall of the Castle in 1801, which ruined several houses.

Eger became the seat of an archbishopric in 1804, and the church remained in firm control of the town, despite efforts by its citizens to obtain greater freedom.

Pyrker László János, the archbishop of that time, founded a gallery which he donated to the Hungarian National Museum because the town did not guarantee an appropriate place for it.

In 1828 Pyrker established the first Hungarian teachers training college in Eger and he was the one who ordered the construction of the basilica which was built in neo-classical style, in accordance with the plans of József Hild.

In 1837, János Joó, an art teacher, began to edit Hungary's first technical journal with the title "Héti Lapok".

At the beginning of the century, in 1904, the first independent theatre of stone was opened and the canalisation and the provision of public utilities began as well.

Economic recovery was slow after World War I, although the 1899 publication of Gárdonyi's "Eclipse of the Crescent Moon" made Eger popular as a tourist attraction and archaeological excavation of the castle resumed.

It is also well known for "Egri Víz", a type of brandy which originated in the 18th century, the "bujavászon" (a special Turkish tissue), as well as its thermal baths.

The constituent dioceses of the province were Košice (Kassa, Kaschau), Rožňava (Rozsnyó, Rosenau, now part of Slovakia), Szatmár, and Szepes (Zipo, Zipsen).