Hungary’s biggest church has been ordained 160 years ago

According to origo.hu, Hungary’s biggest church, the Esztergom Basilica has been ordained 160 years ago. The Assumption and Saint Adalbert Basilica is the main church of the Hungarian Catholic Church.

A church has been standing on top of the Esztergom Castle Hill above Danube since the 10^th century. The first was built by Monarch Géza in honour of Saint Stephen, the first martyr. Legend has it that Géza’s son, King Saint Stephen was born there under the name ‘Vajk’.

The Esztergom archdiocese was founded by Stephen in 1001 and the Saint Adalbert Basilica was already standing in the place of today’s basilica in 1010. Unfortunately it got burnt down in 1180, but King Béla III restored it with the help of Archbishop Jób. That was when the side-chapels were attached to the church.

Ancestors

The basilica got very damaged during the 1543 Ottoman siege and it even got occupied by the Turks after the fall of Esztergom. They turned it into a large mosque and kept gunpowder inside. Hungarians tried to recapture the castle in 1594, but they didn’t succeed, in fact, all of the gunpowder exploded and the only thing that survived was Archbishop Tamás Bakócz’s red marble Annuntiatio-chapel.

Origo.hu writes that later it was Maria Theresa who built a baroque church in the middle of the castle in honour of Saint Stephen. The ruins of the original basilica were cleared off for good during the archdiocese of Ferenc Barkóczy and Sándor Rudnay so that the construction of a deserving basilica could start.

Big plans

Sándor Rudnay desired a huge church. The works were started in 1820 by Pál Kühnel who envisioned a huge building complex, a real Hungarian Vatican on the Castle Hill, with palace-wings, an archiepiscopal palace, seminar and canonical houses. The Vienna court wasn’t impressed by the plans as they didn’t fancy the idea of having the greatest church of the Habsburg Empire in Esztergom. So the grandiose plan was reduced to the basilica and the canonical houses.

The foundation stone was lied on the 23^rd of April, 1822 at Saint Adalbert’s celebration. The construction was led by Kühnel’s nephew, János Packh with a few changes. The main walls, the pillars holding the cupola and the vaultings among the pillars were already standing when Archbishop Rudnay died in 1831 and the construction work stopped.

Photo from 1929

Finish

The construction continued in 1839 with the commission of József Kopácsy as archbishop. However, János Packh was murdered in the same year so the archbishop asked József Hild, the designer of the Eger Basilica, to continue the works. Hild increased the monumental feeling of the building by using ironwork and raising the cupola, which was a very modern touch in that time. Even though Archbishop Kopácsy died in 1847, Hild had so much influence that he could go on with the works in the following years.