St Michael’s Cathedral
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Transcript
Veszprém became one of the earliest centres of the Hungarian church, and the cathedral sits at the heart of that institutional continuity. The bishop of Veszprém traditionally held the privilege of crowning Hungarian queens, which helped create the city’s enduring “City of Queens” identity.
That phrase is often used romantically, but it rested on a concrete ecclesiastical privilege. The cathedral has been rebuilt many times, especially after warfare and later historicist restoration, so it should not be read as a single untouched medieval object. Its importance is institutional: the church here kept reasserting Veszprém’s place in the kingdom even when the architecture changed around it.