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Kőszeg

Sacred Heart Church

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Transcript

The large neo-Gothic Sacred Heart Church belongs to the nineteenth century, when Kőszeg no longer needed to organise itself as a compact fortress. Its scale outside the medieval core signals a different urban confidence.

Historicism allowed modern communities to borrow Gothic forms while using contemporary engineering and construction. That can confuse visitors into reading the church as medieval. In fact, its architectural language is part of a nineteenth-century European fascination with imagined national and Christian pasts. Kőszeg was expanding beyond the logic of walls even while architecture looked backward for inspiration.

Synthetic narration. Sources are linked below.

Sources