Máriaremete: A Pilgrimage Carried from the West
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
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Transcript
Máriaremete’s story begins not with a grand church, but with migration and a small devotional image.
After Ottoman rule, the depopulated Hidegkút area was resettled largely by German-speaking families. District history links many of them to the Black Forest region. The Archdiocese records the tradition of a young settler, Katalin Thalwieser, who brought with her a copy of the revered Marian image from Einsiedeln in Switzerland.
According to the church’s historical tradition, she hung the image on an ash tree in the woods and prayed there. Other people began visiting the site. A small wooden shelter, and later a stone chapel completed in 1808, developed around the devotion.
It is important to phrase this correctly. Stories of miraculous healing belong to the religious tradition of the shrine. They are evidence of belief and pilgrimage, not claims NarRoam can verify as medical fact.
What can be documented is the growth of the place. By the late nineteenth century the earlier chapel was too small for the pilgrimage community. The present neo-Gothic church was consecrated on October 1, 1899. The Archdiocese names Ferenc Schönner as architect and records a crowd of roughly ten thousand at the consecration.
The building therefore connects three geographies: a Hungarian village landscape, German-speaking settler memory and a devotional image copied from Switzerland.
That transnational story fits Pesthidegkút better than a simple narrative of an isolated village. The community was rebuilt through migration, slowly absorbed into metropolitan Budapest, and formally became part of Greater Budapest in 1950.
For our final stop, move from a settlement that survived and grew to one that disappeared.
Gercse was a medieval neighbor of Hidegkút. Its houses vanished. Its church, after centuries of ruin and later rebuilding, remains as the last strong marker of the village.