1360-1686

From a haze of the by-gone centuries and into the light of historiography Sombor first surfaced in 1360, the year a settlement by the name of Szent Mihaly was referred to as being located on the estate of the Cobor family, the one that, at the peak of its power, was to supply heads to the Bodrog County. In 1478, listening anxiously to the beat of the war drums in the south, the Cobors completed the construction of fortifications. These, however, proved insufficient to withhold the overwhelming Ottoman invasion and yielded in 1541. Two years later, 1543, Ottoman registers record the settlement's first appearance under its present-day name – Sombor. One hundred and forty-six years of Ottoman rule have left almost no tangible traces in the town itself, except for the defter entries and literary accounts of travels testifying to its growth into an important market town, an intersection of caravan routes, and the centre of a Turkish county crammed with shops, places of worship, schools, inns and taverns.