Szilágyi Dezső tér Reformed Church: Samu Pecz's Gothic Jewel

Why is it significant?

Stop on the little square by the river and let your eyes climb the church in front of you: brick and pale stone, sharp gables, a spire as pointed as a pencil, and a roof that glitters with patterned glazed tiles whenever the sun touches it. It looks medieval. It was finished in 1896.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stop on the little square by the river and let your eyes climb the church in front of you: brick and pale stone, sharp gables, a spire as pointed as a pencil, and a roof that glitters with patterned glazed tiles whenever the sun touches it. It looks medieval. It was finished in 1896.

This is the Reformed, or Calvinist, church of Buda, built between 1892 and 1896 to the designs of Samu Pecz. Remember that name, because the same architect went on to design one of the great iron-and-glass market halls of Pest. Pecz loved the Gothic, and he made it serve a very Protestant purpose: a bright, clear space for preaching, where every listener could see the pulpit.

For Calvinists that was not a small thing. In Habsburg Buda, rebuilt after 1686 as a fiercely Catholic town, Protestants could not worship openly in churches of their own until Emperor Joseph II issued his Edict of Tolerance in 1781. A century later, here they were, with a church right on the riverbank, facing the Parliament across the water. In the siege of 1944 and 1945 the building was badly damaged, like almost everything in this quarter, and it was patiently repaired after the war.

Now that roof. The tiles come from the Zsolnay factory in Pécs, whose frost-proof glazed ceramics dressed some of the proudest roofs of turn-of-the-century Hungary, including the Matthias Church up on Castle Hill. Zsolnay wanted Hungarian buildings to shine in Hungarian colours, and on a wet day this one does, like the scales of a fish just pulled from the Danube.

And the man the square is named after? Dezső Szilágyi, a famous orator and minister of justice in the 1890s, who championed the laws that made civil marriage compulsory in Hungary. So a square named after the man who took marriage out of the hands of the churches... holds one of the loveliest churches in Buda. Keep walking north along Fő utca, and soon two baroque towers will appear at the edge of a wide square.