Cathedral Basilica of St Stephen
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Transcript
Do not confuse this cathedral with the vanished medieval coronation basilica. The present cathedral belongs mainly to the Baroque rebuilding of the city after Ottoman rule. That distinction is precisely why it is interesting.
Fehérvár had to become an episcopal and administrative city in a new architectural language while living beside the memory of its medieval royal role. Baroque churches and civic buildings filled spaces where war, depopulation and changing rule had broken older continuity. The cathedral therefore represents recovery rather than survival. It shows how eighteenth-century Hungary reconstructed institutions after a century and a half in which this frontier city had been transformed repeatedly.