The installation of the socialist system was accompanied, in Hungary, of an intensification of the development of heavy industry. The main aim was to make of Hungary “the country of iron and steel”, but the electrification of the moved back areas of the country represented also a goal important to reach and it is that the coal was essential to the realization of each one of these projects. Coking coal of the surroundings of Pécs appeared to be appropriate perfectly for the steel industry but it was necessary to increase the output of the local mines. This implied a labor much more, a program of housing construction and, because of the hardness of the dangerous working conditions of minor, the offer of wages higher than the average. Starting from the beginning of the year fifty (between 1952 and 1955) a vast building site was undertaken in the district of Meszes, with the periphery is city. Lines of houses of one or more stages were built along the road of Komló and in parallel small houses intended for the minors ground the ones left after the others. The birth and the important socialist mining urban expansion are not only due to the development of coal industry, it is also the consequence of the exploitation of the uranium mines.

It is for the first time into 1953 that, assisted by a delegation of Soviet experts, Pécsois could identify with certainty a uranium layer, with the limit of the village of K O vágósz O L O S, at the bottom of Jakab mount. The year 1955 was remembered by the appearance of a government enterprise in charge of the exploitation with the uranium seams under the false name with “bauxite mine”. The extraction of the ore began in 1957 for the first mine, as for the fifth and last mine, it opened its doors in 1983. The export of the uranium ore towards the Soviet Union started in 1958.

“Uránváros” (the city of uranium)

Until the years 1990, the mining uranium company played a paramount role in the life of the city. Initially , it provides a sure employment to a large number of people, her manpower rising sometimes to eight thousand employees remunerated exceptionally well. From 1955, the construction of a new part of the city started at the place which the old airport occupied formerly. Initially the Soviet Union ensured the financing of the creation project of this district by a credit without interests. A few years later, the municipality continued only the real estate scheme. Between 1956 and 1967, the urban area of Uránváros - of its official name “Újmecsekalja” - could deliver approximately seven thousand apartments with some twenty thousand new tenants. Thus was born, in Pécs, one of the most successful satellite towns where one inaugurated the concrete panels precasted for the construction of residential buildings. Being invested in this social and communal project of scale, the mining company could be made proud to be at the origin of the creation of a school, a crib, a department store, a center of doctor visits as well as workers' home of a capacity of reception of eight hundred places. But the exploitation also gave its financial support at several sports clubs of the city, arts centres and archaeological research. It provides vehicles and the funds making it possible to carry out excavations on the site of the ground fort of the Jakab mount and also financed the setting at the day then the presentation with the public of the villa of the Roman epoch discovered in the vicinity of the mine. The end of the year 1990 saw the stop of the extraction of the ore but the inhabitants continued to employ the term “Uránváros” in the current language and today still this one is reproduced on the road signs of the buses.

Arts

For the countries located in the zone controlled by the Soviet Union in the Fifties, socialist realism was also of rigor in the field of the civil architecture. However, in Pécs, there exist only little of houses to the decorated frontage of the colonnades and the tympanum representative of this tendency. It is rather with the periphery of the downtown area that one surprises of it sometimes some discrete specimens, set up, that and there, on open spaces formerly left between two constructions. For example in the street Attila József the massive building of the old seat of the party evokes the esthetic classicism with its surmounted projecting central body of a tympanum and the parapet with balusters of its balcony.

Having adopted the ideology of the party in power, the direction of the party of Pécs extended its sphere of influence to the high level cultural activities of the university town. It was interfered dramaturgy, of

literature, delivered its opinion on the fine arts and choreography and intervened in the life of several institutions of which it obstructed work passably by imposing its neophytes points of view of. Moreover the centralized power of the capital also transmitted its instructions to the province: the instruction wanted that the middle-class intellectuals are replaced in their task by workmen. The introduction of a service of consultation by correspondence relating to questions relating to the fine arts (it is not specified if this formula were addressed to beginners or to pupils of advanced level) is an attempt which makes smile today. In parallel enthusiastic “teachers of the people” organized each year the programs of the cultural week of Pécs in which took part regularly of the famous artists.

It is into 1954-55 that the oldest house of Pécs was restored which shelters the Zsolnay museum since the opening of its doors, in November 1955. The equestrian statue of János Hunyadi - work of Pál Pátzay, was set up on the Széchenyi place on on August 17th, 1956. As for the year 1957, she saw the foundation and the unveiling of the first Hungarian gallery of modern art - museum presenting to the public, the collection of plastic works emanating from the Hungarian avant-garde. However at this period, Pécsois asserted besides all this their right to intellectual freedom and the access to independence.