Matthias Church

This church has been Catholic, then a mosque, then Catholic again. It has been Romanesque, then Gothic, then Baroque, then Gothic again. It has hosted royal coronations, survived Mongol invasions, and been used as a horse stable by Soviet soldiers. If Budapest had a building that embodied its history of reinvention, this is the one.

Originally founded in the eleventh century, the church was destroyed by the Mongols in 1241 and rebuilt in the late Gothic style by King Béla IV between 1255 and 1269. Its finest hour came under King Matthias Corvinus in the fifteenth century, when the southwest bell tower was added — one of the finest pieces of Gothic architecture in Hungary. The church took his name informally, though its official dedication has always been to the Virgin Mary.

When the Ottomans conquered Buda in 1541, they whitewashed the frescoes and converted the church into the city's main mosque for nearly 150 years. After the Habsburgs recaptured the city in 1686, it became Catholic again, was remodelled in Baroque style, and then in the 1870s architect Frigyes Schulek stripped away the Baroque additions and restored the Gothic structure, adding the distinctive diamond-patterned Zsolnay ceramic roof tiles that make the church unmistakable today.

During the 1944-45 siege, the Germans used the crypt as a field kitchen. When the city fell, the Soviets stabled their horses in the nave. The building sustained serious damage that took decades to repair. Today, you can attend organ concerts inside, and the acoustics in the vaulted Gothic interior are extraordinary.