Esztergom Basilica — Building a National Church
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The Basilica is designed to look inevitable, as if a church of this scale had always belonged on Castle Hill. In reality it is the product of a long nineteenth-century campaign to restore Esztergom’s ecclesiastical authority after centuries of disruption.
Saint Stephen founded the archdiocese here around the creation of the Christian kingdom. A medieval cathedral stood on the hill, but Ottoman conquest in 1543 forced the archbishops away and warfare damaged the complex. When the see finally returned in the nineteenth century, Archbishop Sándor Rudnay wanted architecture large enough to announce that return.
The foundation stone of the present building was laid in 1822. Work passed through several archbishops and architects; the cathedral was consecrated in 1856, while decoration continued afterward. The Latin inscription on the façade calls it the “head, mother and teacher of the churches of Hungary.” That is not modest language.
One extraordinary survivor complicates the clean neoclassical composition. The Renaissance Bakócz Chapel, completed in 1507, was dismantled stone by stone and rebuilt inside the new Basilica. In one building, therefore, you can see both nineteenth-century nation-building and a literal piece of the pre-Ottoman cathedral world preserved within it.