St. Stephen's Basilica

Look up from the centre of the church and you see Károly Lotz’s mosaic of God the Father looking down, surrounded by gilded ribs, with a ring of prophets below and the four evangelists in the corners above the pillars.

It was all meant to be fresco. The plan changed to glass mosaic, the larger pieces made by the Salviati workshop in Venice and the smaller ones by Miksa Róth in Pest.

The statues in the niches under the dome are the saints of Hungary’s first royal house: St Gellért with the young St Imre, St Elizabeth, and St László, the last work of the sculptor János Fadrusz. Only Hungarian sculptors and painters were hired for the interior.

Spend 10 minutes doing a full slow loop of the space before you look at anything in detail. The proportions are the point; the decoration is the flourish. There are seats under the dome, so sit down for the ceiling.

At the far end of the church, under the canopy of the main altar, stands King Stephen himself, carved in Carrara marble and holding the double cross and the orb, the symbols of his power as apostle and as king. The archangel on top of the canopy is Gabriel, holding the Holy Crown.

Look behind the statue for Ede Mayer’s bronze reliefs of scenes from Stephen’s life, from the defeat of his rival Koppány to the arrival of the crown from Rome. The Latin above them asks King Stephen to intercede for us, and the half-dome over it all was designed by Gyula Benczúr.

This is the photograph everyone takes, so come here first if you arrive at opening time.

The Szent Jobb is the mummified right hand of Saint Stephen I, kept in a glass cylinder inside a chapel-shaped neo-Gothic reliquary made in Vienna in 1862. Since 2018 it has stood in the church itself, at the Altar of Our Lady of Hungary in the transept, not in the side chapel where it was shown before.

The relic dates back to shortly after Stephen’s death in 1038 and has had a long journey. It was kept at Székesfehérvár, in Bosnia and in Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik, before Maria Theresa had it brought to Buda in 1771, and it came into the Basilica’s care in 1950.

Visitors drop a coin into a small donation box; the reliquary lights up for a brief period, giving you a proper look at the relic itself, then clicks off. No flash here. Once a year, on 20 August, it leaves the church for the St Stephen’s Day procession.

The Panorama Terrace wraps around the base of the dome at 65 metres. The view is a full circle: the Parliament’s dome to the north-west, Buda Castle and Gellért Hill across the river, and Zrínyi utca running dead straight from the front steps towards the Danube.

You reach it by lift or 364 steps. The lift route is two lifts, a larger one and then a smaller one, and if the queue for the second is long you can walk that stretch instead, about 200 steps. Either way there are stairs at the top.

The terrace is open to the weather and closes at 19:00 all year, which means sunset from the top only works from about October to mid-March.

The Treasury is on the same ticket as the terrace, up a few steps in the south tower, and it is easy to walk past on the way down. It moved in 2011 into a space three times the size of the old one, and many of the objects on show are still used in services.

The first hall tells the story of the building: models and plaster casts from the construction, the papal letter that made the church a basilica minor, a Herend porcelain copy of the Holy Crown and the full uniform of a crown guard. The inner rooms hold the chalices, the vestments and the largest monstrance in the country, made in 1938, alongside the personal belongings of Cardinal József Mindszenty.

It is small and can be covered comfortably in 20 minutes, but the craftsmanship, particularly on the older chalices, is remarkable.

The Basilica’s great organ was built by József Angster in 1905 and has been rebuilt and enlarged three times since. It now has 93 stops and 7,544 pipes, the longest 10.5 metres and the smallest 5 millimetres. Look for the rank of trumpets that sticks out horizontally from the front of the gilded case.

Concerts run on most evenings of the week, under different organisers, usually at 20:00. The Thursday concert is 70 minutes of organ with a singer and soloists. If you would rather get close to the instrument, the Wednesday morning programme takes a small group up to the organ gallery, where the organist explains how it works and then plays for 20 minutes.

Both are on our tickets page, and the guided options are compared on the tours page.