The Capuchin Church: Ottoman Arches in a Christian Wall

Why is it significant?

Stand on Fő utca, the old main street of Buda's Water Town, and face the narrow church with the tall pointed windows and the slightly storybook front. It looks like a nineteenth-century building, and in a way it is.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand on Fő utca, the old main street of Buda's Water Town, and face the narrow church with the tall pointed windows and the slightly storybook front. It looks like a nineteenth-century building, and in a way it is. But walk a few steps along its southern side and study the wall... set into the stone are the outlines of pointed arches that no Christian mason ever drew.

Those arches are Ottoman. For almost a century and a half, from 1541 to 1686, Buda was a provincial capital of the Ottoman Empire, and this riverside strip, squeezed between Castle Hill and the Danube, was full of mosques, baths and workshops. When Christian armies retook Buda in 1686, the Capuchin friars arrived and raised their church on the walls of an Ottoman building, by most accounts a mosque. Restorers later uncovered the old door and window frames and left them on show, a visible seam between two worlds.

The church is dedicated to Saint Elizabeth of Hungary, a thirteenth-century princess of the House of Árpád who gave her short life to the poor. Her best-loved legend is about roses. The story goes that she was carrying bread to the hungry, hidden in her cloak, when she was stopped and ordered to show what she was carrying. She opened the cloth... and the bread had turned into roses. Keep that flower in mind. It returns at the far end of this walk, on a hill named after roses, at the grave of a Muslim holy man.

What you see today was largely remodelled in the 1850s in the romantic style then in fashion, which is why the front looks so much younger than its bones. That is the rule of Víziváros: almost every facade is a coat of paint over something far older. For centuries this was a quarter of fishermen, boatmen and craftsmen, living below the royal palace and outside its glory, and it kept its history in its walls rather than on its plaques.

Now walk north. In a few steps the street opens onto a sloping little square named after King Matthias Corvinus, with a turreted, almost castle-like building along its upper side. Head towards it, and listen out for fiddles.