Prakfalvi Endre: Roman Catholic Churches in Unified Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)

The Parish Church of Our Lady of Hungary, 1931

The Parish Church of Our Lady of Hungary, 1931

Rezső tér, District Vili

"Our Lady oh Hungary, our Patroneió oh old / TLiua ipeaki to you our country in iti great ahhlictlon / Forget not your poor Hungáriám" (Hymn, 1714)

The feast of Our Lady of Hungary (the Immaculate Virgin) was approved, on the request of Prince Primate Kolos Vaszary, by Pope Leo XIII in 1896.

The history of the construction of this church in the civil servants' "garden city” dates back to 1913. The competition for a memorial church to mark the jubilee of Francis Joseph was won by Ödön Lechner with his design for a neo- Romanesque church as stipulated in the tender invitation. The project could not be fulfilled in the war years. Then, in another competition in 1927, it was designs made by Jenő Lechner that were accepted. In a simplified form he preserved his uncle's plans for a Greek-cross groundplan. The superstructure, however, met the new expectations which were of a neo-Classical appearance or, to use the nomenclature of the period, the early nineteenth-century "Palatine" style characterising the period of Palatine Joseph. Besides the monu- ment-like function of the building, the change in style may have been motivated by the fact that the architect had completed the restoration of the

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