Matits Ferenc: Protestant Churches - Our Budapest (Budapest, 2003)

principle of the aesthetically and technically superior execution of the job was to restore the church to its original function with the application of the most advanced technologies of church design. A congregation hall with auxiliary rooms was appointed in the basement. The interior is based upon the original arrangement but the furnishings—the sacrificial table, the chairs that have replaced pews and the organ installed on the gallery—are of a modern, functionalist design. The three hymn-boards surviving from the original church are once again in use. The building is equipped with a modern heating system and a lift. A conference room, a nursery and offices have been put in upstairs on the gallery. The seating capacity of the ground-floor space is 250 and another 30 can be seated upstairs. The largest of the church's bells, which weighed 612 kilograms and was given to the church as a gift of Emperor William II in 1878, was lost in World War 11. To purchase a replacement, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán donated the money received from his Franz Joseph Strauss Prize won in 2001. The German-Hungarian Protestant Forum, which organises social and cultural events, functions on the premises.

The Fasor Calvinist Church

No. 7 Városligeti fasor, District VII

Budapest grew into a metropolis in the second half of the 19th century. This was when multi-storey apartment blocks, mansions and villas mushroomed in the area bordered by today's Great Boulevard on one side and the City park on the other. From 1892, the Calvinists of the neighbourhood used a large room in an apartment house on Erzsébet Boulevard as their hall of prayer. When that proved to be too small, they rented, from 1896 to 1913, Miklós Izsó's former studio for the same purpose. In 1903 the community launched a fund raising campaign to build a church. The metal artist Adolf Laky of Alistal (1829—1910), who worked as the warden of the Budapest Calvinist Parish, alone contributed as much as 300 thousand korona to the fund in 1908. This generous supporter of the cause did not live to see the commencement of construction, but left in his testament three times the original sum to the church for the same and related ecclesiastical purposes. A bust of the contributor, made by Béla Raith (1885-1915), stands in the churchyard.

Tenders were invited in 1909 for designs of a church to stand on a plot at the corner of Izabella and Sándor Hegedűs (today’s Szófia) Streets. As the plot turned out to be unsuitable, another one in Városligeti fasor (City Park Avenue)

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