A church with a tiled roof like a carpet, two coronations, and a century and a half as a mosque in between.
Its real name is the Church of the Assumption of the Buda Castle. Everyone calls it Matthias Church, after King Matthias Corvinus, who was married here twice in the fifteenth century and whose raven crest is worked into the stonework.
The roof is what people photograph: diamond-patterned Zsolnay tiles in green, gold and terracotta, from the Pécs factory that also glazed half the Art Nouveau roofs in Hungary. They look medieval and are not — Frigyes Schulek added them during his restoration of 1874–96, the same project that produced the Fisherman’s Bastion next door. Schulek was rebuilding a Gothic church that had been so heavily altered he had to decide what it should have looked like, and then build that. Purists have argued about it ever since. It is beautiful regardless.
The Ottoman century
When Buda fell in 1541 the church became the city’s principal mosque. The furnishings were removed, the walls were whitewashed over the frescoes, and it stayed that way for a hundred and forty-five years. A legend attached to the recapture in 1686 says a wall collapsed during the siege to reveal a hidden statue of the Madonna, and that the Ottoman garrison’s morale broke at the sight. The interior you see now, richly painted in a Hungarian folk-derived style by Károly Lotz and Bertalan Székely, is entirely nineteenth-century.
Two coronations
Franz Joseph and Elisabeth were crowned King and Queen of Hungary here in 1867, sealing the Compromise that created the Dual Monarchy. Liszt wrote his Hungarian Coronation Mass for the occasion. The last Habsburg coronation, of Charles IV, took place here in 1916, two years before the monarchy ended altogether.
Visiting
The nave is ticketed, and the ticket includes a small museum in the crypt and upper gallery with sacred objects and a replica of the crown. Services are held and the church closes to visitors during them, which is worth checking if you are on a tight schedule. The tower climb is sold separately, in timed slots, with a guide.
Concerts — organ, and often the Coronation Mass — run through the year and are the best way to hear the acoustic.
