Budapest houses of worship

I have just realised that I have not shown any photographs of  the two famous houses of worship in Budapest.  Below is the neo-Gothic Matyas Templom (Matthew's Church) in Buda.  So named because the 15th century Rennaissance king Matthias Corvinus was married here.  Corvinus comes from the raven, corvus in latin, which appeared on his heraldry.

It is a late nineteenth century re-creation by architect Frigyes Schulek, grafted onto those portions of the original thirteenth century church that survived the siege of 1686.

The church has a very lovely tower.

Above is a model of the church as it is not possible to capture the entirety in one photograph.

The colourful frescoes and wall decorations were executed by the Romantic painters Karoly Lotz and Bertalan Szekely, foremost historical painters of the nineteenth century.

When we were there, someone was painting over the lovingly restored decorations.  The church was closed when we last visited five years ago as it was being restored.  The result of the restoration is stunning.










There are several synagogues in the old Jewish quarter and the Orthodox Synagogue in Dob utca is currently being beautifully refurbished as seen below.

However, it is to the Great Synagogue in Dohany utca that the tourists flock to by the thousands.  It is the largest synagogue in the world outside of New York.   It was built in 1859 with Romantic and Moorish elements.  It has been magnificently renovated with funds raised by the Hungarian government and a New York based charity headed by the actor Tony Curtis whose parents emigrated from Hungary in the 1920s. The exterior is very beautiful but the inside does not compare to the most beautiful of all synagogues, in my view, the Szeged synagogue.  That is the most beautiful I have seen.  Sadly, few tourists go to Szeged and they will never see its beauty.  Busfulls come to Dohany utca each day and the queues are endless.  The cost of entry is quite steep but it is good that so much money is being raised.

Inside of the synagogue.

And the performance of the wonderful klezmer band Haszene in the synagogue as part of the annual Jewish summer festival that has been held in Budapest for the last 16 years. 

The Raoul Wallenberg memorial inside the synagogue precinct dedicated to the 'righteous gentile', the Swedish diplomat  and businessman who rescued as many as 35,000 Hungarian Jews during WWII and who disappeared into one of Stalin's Gulags to die in an umarked and unknown grave.

and finally the cave church on Gellert Hill built in 1926.  It was the seat of the Paulite order until the late 1940s when the priests were arrested and the cave sealed off.  When I lived in Budapest I knew nothing of the existence of this cave church.  It was reopened in the early 1990s and reconsecrated.