St. Stephen's Basilica History

József Hild began the church in 1851 in a strict classicist style. When he died in 1867, Miklós Ybl took over. Ybl was one of the architects shaping modern Budapest, the man who would go on to design the Hungarian State Opera House, and he shifted the design toward neo-Renaissance.

After the 1868 dome collapse he corrected the faults in Hild’s design and reworked the whole church. József Kauser finished the work after Ybl’s death in 1891, designing the interior, its furnishings and its decoration with the parish priest, Lénárd Lollok, to a single scheme. Only Hungarian sculptors and painters were invited to contribute.

The result is a building with three architectural voices layered on top of each other. Hild’s footprint defines the ground plan, Ybl’s vision gives the building its height and proportion, and Kauser’s decorative programme sets the tone inside.

On 22 January 1868 the unfinished dome came down. The cause was not the weather but faulty workmanship and poor materials, and Ybl, who had only just taken over from Hild, had design errors to correct as well.

Clearing the rubble and rebuilding the faulty sections took until 1871, and work on Ybl’s new design did not resume until 1875. It is the main reason construction stretched so long.

The story goes that at the keystone ceremony in 1906, Emperor Franz Joseph kept glancing up at the dome.

Both St. Stephen’s Basilica and the Hungarian Parliament, completed a year earlier, stand exactly 96 metres tall. The number is not accidental. It commemorates the year 896, the traditional date of the Magyar settlement of the Carpathian Basin. It is hard not to read the matching heights as a statement too, one building for the church and one for the state, neither taller than the other.

For more than a century planning rules kept everything else in the city below the pair, which is why the skyline remains so flat and why the Panorama Terrace view is so open.

King Stephen died on 15 August 1038. When the chapter at Székesfehérvár later hid his body in a burial chamber to protect it, the right hand, which had survived intact and was believed to have miraculous power, was separated and kept as a relic.

Over the following centuries it was held at Székesfehérvár, in Bosnia and in Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik, until Maria Theresa had it brought to Buda in 1771 and ordered 20 August to be kept as St Stephen’s Day.

In the early 1900s it was kept in the Sigismund Chapel of the Buda Castle palace. It was taken west in 1944 to keep it from the war and came back to Hungary on 19 August 1945.

The Basilica’s parish has looked after it since 1950. It went on display in a side chapel in 1987, and since 2018 it has stood in the church itself, inside a neo-Gothic reliquary made in Vienna in 1862.

The Basilica did not come through the siege of Budapest in 1944 to 1945 unscathed. The roof, the towers and the outer walls were all damaged, and in 1947 a fire during the roof repairs damaged the timber frame of the dome.

A storm in 1982 tore at the dome’s metal covering, and the following year a complete renovation began that lasted until 2003. The lifts that now carry visitors towards the Panorama Terrace date from the end of that work.

All but one of the bells were lost to wartime requisition. The survivor, the Holy Virgin bell of 1863, was spared on a plea of clemency for its unusual sound. The others were replaced between 1990 and 1993, a gift of German Catholics and the Rotary Club, among them the 9,250-kilogram St Stephen bell, the largest in Hungary.

The Basilica has been the co-cathedral of the Archdiocese of Esztergom-Budapest since 1993. Major liturgical events and commemorations of Saint Stephen’s Day on 20 August are still held here. Hungarian Catholic identity remains tightly bound to Saint Stephen and to this building; you can see it in the crowds that follow the Holy Right procession every 20 August.