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

The St. Ladislas Parish Church, 1897

■ The interior

different character of the smaller details, whose provenance is the ornamentation of Hungary’s folk architecture, a hallmark of Lechner's art. Nevertheless, the church is a fine specimen of Lechner's endeavour to create a national style of architecture. As he expounds in his "A Hungarian Idiom of Architecture is a Thing of the Future Not of the Past", "there certainly is a national style in Hungary,” and failure to recognize it is a symptom of "intellectual sloth" (Mű- véizet, Art, 1906).

Asserting its rights, the municipality of Budapest commissioned Ottó Tandor, rather than Lechner, to design the interior, which is why the opportunity of creating a unified effect was missed. It was to plans by Tandor that the altars, the pulpit, and baptismal font were designed by Vilmos Marchenke and made in the Zsolnay factory. Set in the huge main altar reminiscent of an iconostasis, the altarpiece representing the apotheosis of St. Ladislas, the knightly king (reigned 1077-95) who consolidated Hungary as a Christian country, was painted by Ignác Roskovics. The figurái stained-glass windows of the church, which were made to cartoons prepared by Miksa Róth, perished in World War II, and no decorative painting of the walls had been prepared in the first place. The

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