St. Stephen's Basilica

In the eighteenth century the ground now occupied by the basilica carried the Hetz-Theater, a house given over to animal fights. János Zitterbarth, a wealthy resident of the newly laid out district of Lipótváros, had a small temporary church put up on the spot. In 1817 about a thousand of the faithful formed the Lipótváros parish, and with it came the demand that the district should have a substantial parish church of its own. A collection was opened and several designs were drawn up, among them those of Ignác Brein and József Hild.

What turned the plan into a building was the great flood of 1838. The middle of what is now Szent István Square formed a slight natural rise in the flat ground of Pest, and several hundred residents sheltered there from the current until boats could take them off. Survivors gave votive donations so that a church might be raised on the place where they had been saved. In 1845 Hild was commissioned to prepare the plans; earthworks began in 1846, and the work was then held up by the revolution and war of independence of 1848 to 1849, during which Zitterbarth's church, already condemned to demolition, was itself badly damaged.

Building to Hild's classicist design began on 14 August 1851, and the foundation stone was laid on 4 October of the same year. Its chief patron was Baron Simon Sina, a banker of Aromanian origin. Hild directed the works until his death in 1867, and only afterwards did it come out that there had been faults both in the quality of the building material and in the execution. On 22 January 1868 the dome, by then walled up, collapsed under one-sided loading and the uneven settling of its piers; some accounts place the fall ten years earlier, in 1858. Clearing the rubble and taking down the badly raised sections lasted until 1871.

Miklós Ybl was asked to rework the plans and to take charge of the site. He recast Hild's classicist scheme in a neo-Renaissance manner, and the church took the form it has now under him. Ybl remained works director until his death in 1891. The church is not laid out on a basilican plan at all but on a Greek cross, and holds eight thousand people.

The decoration and the final fitting out were finished by 1905 under József Kauser, who designed the canopied high altar and the pulpit. Károly Lotz painted the dome and its drum, Ede Mayer cast the bronze relief series on the life of Stephen, Alajos Stróbl made the statue of the king on the altar, and the organ came from József Angster's factory at Pécs. At 96 metres the church is level with the Hungarian Parliament Building, and for a long period regulations forbade anything taller in Budapest. The original intention had been to name it for Saint Leopold, patron saint of Austria, but in 1897, in the wake of the millennium celebrations of 1896, the archiepiscopal authority placed it under the protection of King Saint Stephen and it was dedicated in his name. It was consecrated on 9 November 1905, and the keystone was set on 8 December 1906 in the presence of the ruler, Franz Joseph I.

In 1931 Pope Pius XI granted the church the title of basilica minor. In May 1938 it was the central venue of the thirty-fourth International Eucharistic Congress, held in Budapest, and the district around it was renamed Szentistvánváros in the same year.

During the siege of Budapest the bombardment of 1944 and 1945 did serious damage to the walls and the towers, and the whole roof structure had to be replaced. The cellar sheltered a large number of refugees and a valuable collection of archives. While the repairs were still under way, in 1947, the dome burned again, and the money for putting it right was raised by a collection across the country.

The ring has been broken up twice by war. The first great bell, cast in 1891 in the workshop of Ferenc Walser and consecrated in honour of the Holy Trinity in 1892, was requisitioned during the First World War along with four of its fellows. Its successor, cast by László Szlezák in 1930 and weighing 7,945 kilograms, was carried off for war purposes on 20 May 1944. Only the Blessed Virgin bell, cast by Walser in Pest in 1863, came through both wars, and it is the one original bell the church still has. The present great bell, of 9,250 kilograms, was made at the Perner foundry in Passau in 1990 and hangs in the south tower; four smaller bells from the same workshop, named for Saint Henry, Blessed Gizella, Saint Emeric and Saint Elizabeth of the House of Árpád, were consecrated on 20 August 1993.

The musical life of the church has counted since its consecration in 1905. Dezső Antalffy-Zsiross, Aladár Zalánffy, Ernő Szakolczay-Riegler and Sebestyén Pécsi were among those who held the post of first organist, which István Koloss then held from 1963 to 2010 and András Gábor Virágh has held since. The choir was founded in 1909 by Jenő Sztojanovics and passed to Dezső Demény from 1913 to 1937, Artúr Harmat from 1938 to 1959 and Frigyes Hidas from 1959 to 1962, before László Fehér took it for sixty years from 1962 to 2022; Dávid Farkasházi has directed it since 2022. Singing sacred and concert music alike, the choir has toured widely in Europe.

The church has been the chief setting of the cult of Saint Stephen since it was consecrated, and the king's preserved right hand, the Holy Right, is kept there as a relic. Before 1971 the place of safekeeping for the national relic changed continually; in that year a fitting store was made for it in the former Saint Leopold chapel behind the sanctuary, now the Holy Right chapel, to designs by the church artist György Dominek, and the basilica has held it permanently since. The country's leadership still would not allow a procession in 1971, so the two chief elements of the cult, the basilica and the Holy Right procession, were only joined in 1989; until then the relic was simply brought out from the chapel into the sanctuary for veneration. Carrying it in procession on 20 August is now the central act of the year. Pope John Paul II visited on the feast of King Saint Stephen in 1991, and in 1993 he raised the church to the rank of co-cathedral of the Esztergom-Budapest archdiocese, alongside the basilica at Esztergom.

In 1982 the building became dangerous once more when a violent storm threw the metal sheeting of the great dome into the street. A complete renovation was begun in 1983 and ran until 14 August 2003, taking in not only the fabric but every work of art in the church, the mosaics, the paintings, the sculpture and the leaded glass. A viewing gallery was made in the dome, reached by lift or by 364 steps, and the square outside was rebuilt at the same time.

A treasury was opened in 1988 in the ground-floor room of the south tower; on 6 June 2010 Cardinal Péter Erdő, Primate and Archbishop of Esztergom-Budapest, consecrated a new Blessed Sacrament chapel in that room. On 19 March 2012, the feast of Saint Joseph, an enlarged treasury of three rooms was opened, built around the fullest surviving legacy of Cardinal József Mindszenty and shown for the hundred and twentieth anniversary of his birth; it holds mass vestments from the old royal palace church of Buda Castle and, on permanent deposit, an authenticated carved copy of the Holy Right given by Maria Theresa to the order of the English Ladies. The crypt, which once housed the offices of the municipal archives, has been a burial place for urns and coffins since 1996; the footballers Ferenc Puskás, Sándor Kocsis, Gyula Grosics and Jenő Buzánszky lie there, as does Antal Bejczy, a physicist and senior researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The largest church in Budapest and the third largest in Hungary, it stands within the buffer zone of the city's UNESCO World Heritage Site. From its building it had been state property, the Hungarian Catholic Church registered only as the manager of the premises; on 16 August 2001 it passed formally into church ownership.