Matthias Church

Interesting facts

King Matthias Corvinus held both of his weddings here, in 1463 and 1476, and the south entrance is still called the Bride's Gate.

When Buda fell in 1541, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent gave thanks for his victory inside the church, newly converted into a mosque.

Returning from captivity in Prague in 1458, Matthias inaugurated his reign here without a coronation, because the Holy Crown was then outside Hungary.

In 1412 King Sigismund hung banners captured from Venice on the church walls, starting a custom later followed by John Hunyadi.

The Madonna in the Loreto Chapel dates from the late 17th century, made to replace the medieval statue that had been walled up under Ottoman rule.

During the 1944–45 siege the crypt served as a German field kitchen, and afterwards Soviet troops stabled horses in the sanctuary.

Only in 1999, for the first time in its long history, was the church handed to the Catholic Church as parish property.

Schulek invented the diamond-patterned roof and the gargoyle-studded spire himself, which made his restoration controversial when it was finished.

The neo-Gothic pulpit carries statues of the four evangelists alternating with the four Latin Doctors of the Church, each with their traditional symbol.

Queen Elizabeth, known as Sisi, was crowned queen of Hungary here alongside Franz Joseph in 1867.

Why it is worth it

Seen from Pest across the Danube, the Matthias Church is the spike of Buda's skyline: a slender pale tower with a pointed spire, and beside it a steep roof glazed in diamond patterns of yellow, green and dark blue. Formally it is the Church of the Assumption of the Buda Castle, a parish church rather than a cathedral, but for Hungarians it has been the coronation church and a stage of their royal history for centuries. The building visitors see today is as much a nineteenth-century vision of the Hungarian Middle Ages as a medieval survival — and it is that romantic vision, carried through to the last painted column, that makes it so striking.

Tradition ascribes a first church here to King Stephen in 1015, but nothing of it is proven. The Mongol invasion of 1241 wiped out whatever stood, and it was rebuilt in the second half of the thirteenth century under Béla IV. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it grew into a Gothic hall church: around 1370 Louis I began the Mary Portal, whose closest relative is the portal of St Lawrence in Nuremberg, and by 1470 King Matthias Corvinus had completed the great southwest tower, which carries his coat of arms and still keeps stone heads of the Hunyadi family on its capitals. It rises some 78 metres. From 1541 to 1686, under Ottoman rule, the church served as a mosque, known as the Great Mosque. During the siege of 1686, so the story goes, cannon fire brought down a wall and revealed a hidden statue of the Virgin, dispiriting the garrison on the day the city fell.

The Jesuits then refitted it in Baroque style, and it was Frigyes Schulek who, between 1874 and 1896, stripped that away and rebuilt the church as a richly coloured neo-Gothic shrine for Hungary's millennium celebrations. For the roof the Zsolnay works in Pécs supplied close to 150,000 frost-proof ceramic tiles. Inside, almost no surface is left bare: columns, vaults and walls are covered in painted patterns and figures, work directed by the painters Bertalan Székely and Károly Lotz, and the windows by Ede Kratzmann tell the life of the Virgin. In a side chapel lie King Béla III and his first wife, Anne of Châtillon, moved here in 1898. Two coronations bracket Schulek's work: that of Franz Joseph in 1867, when Liszt's Coronation Mass was first performed, and that of Charles IV, the last king, in December 1916.

The church stands on Holy Trinity Square at the heart of the Castle District, part of the Budapest UNESCO World Heritage site, with the Fisherman's Bastion — also by Schulek — as its terrace towards the river. It was badly damaged in the siege of 1944–45 and restored over the following decades. A museum of church art occupies the crypt.

Getting there

The church stands in the Buda Castle District of Budapest, a few hundred metres from the castle palace. Budapest Liszt Ferenc International Airport (BUD) is about 19 km away. Bus 16 from Deák Ferenc tér in Pest crosses the Chain Bridge and climbs to Szentháromság tér in front of the church; alternatively, the Castle Hill Funicular rises from Clark Ádám tér at the Buda end of the Chain Bridge, and it is about five minutes' walk from its upper station.

Plan your visit

We have no confirmed visit data yet. Once it is confirmed, this block also carries the date it was checked.

From the encyclopaedia

The Church of the Assumption of the Buda Castle, more commonly known as the Matthias Church and more rarely as the Coronation Church of Buda, is a Catholic church in Holy Trinity Square, Budapest, Hungary, in front of the Fisherman's Bastion at the heart of Buda's Castle District.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

On these lists

From the encyclopaedia