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

The Parish Church of St. Ladislas, 1929

A year later, on i December 1929, the cardinal consecrated the building. According to our sources, Ernő Foerk cooperated with Gyula Petrovácz as an associate.

The reinforcement of this free-standing, neo-Gothic church was called for when its flooring began to sink in 1934. The brick building, which is turned to the orient, is a three-aisle structure with a Latin-cross groundplan. On either side of its chancel, which closes with five sides of an octagon, there is an upper oratory.

The tower on the front side begins with a square cross-section, which turns into an octagon and then a decahexagon, with the crossing accentuated by a ridge tower. Painted by a disciple of the Rome school, Pál C. Molnár, the original altar- piece was later replaced with a multi-winged poliptichon altar (1942-48). During Holy Week, when the wings are shut, the picture shows scenes from the Passion with Golgotha in the middle. When the wings are spread on the other days of the year, the altarpiece shows scenes from the life and legend of the titular saint St. Ladislas. There is a picture on the middle panel showing him elected commander of the Crusade. (The king was prevented from fulfilling that mission by his death in 1095.) Represented on the other panels are, among other scenes, the freeing of the Hungarian girl from her abductor the Cumanian warrior, the opening of the Torda crevice with the miracle of drawing water, and the death of the Patron of Transylvania and founder of the (Nagy)Várad Diocese, as a cart with Ladislas’s body on it is being drawn to his last resting place in the cathedral of Várad. (The legend of St. Ladislas, initiator of the canonization of Stephen 1, was commemorated on many church walls in Hungary proper, Upper Northern Hungary and Transylvania.)

■ The groundplan at the height oh the cron-vaults—and the presbytery

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