Esztergom - What a Church!

The Basilica From the Front

 August 9 - Today our travels led us off the beaten path to the unique city of Esztergom.  The town itself is to the Northeast of Budapest and takes about 90 minutes by train.

The city itself is deceptively historic and surprisingly unknown to tourists.  It was here, near the banks of the Danube, that Marcus Aurelius penned his famous Meditations.  The city also has great significance to the Hungarians as it was the birthplace of Saint Stephen was and the location of his coronation as the first king of Hungary (.  The main (and nearly only) attraction in the city is the massive Esztergom Basilica, the largest church in Hungary.  It also holds the honors as being the tallest building of any kind in Hungary and the 18th largest church in the world.

Statue of St. Stephen's Coronation

Our tenure in Esztergom started at the train station, well outside of town.  On the walk toward the basilica, we found ourselves in the true Hungarian countryside.  Kati hasn't been able to recall much of her previous visit here, but she said that walking from the train station looked a lot like the way she remembered Hungary when she was a child.  It was quite a walk.  It took us 20 minutes just to get into "town."  The basilica is built upon a large cliff, and we had difficulty figuring out which way to head up the hill, so we opted to walk along the Little Danube (small off-shoot from the Danube) along a quaint shaded sidewalk in a very residential part of town.  We quickly found we were on the wrong side of the basilica--looking straight up the cliff at the back of the building.  However, we stumbled upon signs for the "catwalk" which turned out to be a back-alley, marked by a grate depicting cats.  This alley led to stairs that wound their way up the face of the cliff to the back of the basilica.  The climb was nice and the views were stunning.

At the top, we took a break to take in the panoramic views.  Esztergom is right on the border between Hungary and Slovakia.  The bank right across the Danube marked the start of Slovakia.  If we had more time, we could have walked there!  But we were there for the basilica.  The basilica is unbelievable inside.  The dome peaks at 76 meters (249 feet) tall.  It was decorated a little more simplistically than some of the other churches we've seen, but that just added to its magnanimous beauty.

We also bought tickets to see the Treasury, the Cupola (Dome), and the Crypt.  The treasury was pretty neat.  As you would expect, it contained an inordinate number of priceless religious artifacts: crosses, chalices, relics, and ornate religious garb.

The crypt famously contains the remains of the controversial Cardinal Mindszenty, who refused to allow Hungary's Catholic schools to be secularized.  Mindszenty was a strong critic of the Vatican's relations with the communist regime in Hungary.  He eventually left for Vienna, vowing that he would not return to his homeland until the last Soviet soldier left Hungarian soil.  He died in Vienna in 1975 but his remains were not returned until May 1991, ironically two weeks before the last Soviet soldier departed from Hungarian soil.

Our last stop before leaving the Basilica was the dome.  I hadn't realized you could go up in the dome until we had already bought tickets that included it, but I was really excited.  We started climbing a spiral staircase that couldn't have been any more narrow.  It tightly wound up...and up...and up.  We got to a nice, stable, steel viewing platform that wrapped around the dome and I was thrilled we had made it.  But Kati, much to her chagrin, pointed out that we could go higher still.  Again we found ourselves in a ridiculously tightly-wound spiral staircase that seemed to never end.  Kati, starting to worry asked me if it was much further.  I probably shouldn't have said, "Well, we are climbing almost an entire football field up, so a ways."  Yet she did great during the ascent.  When we reached the top we found ourselves literally 15 feet from the tip of the dome on a make-shift wooden platform that wound around the entire dome.  Only small steel rails separated us from a quick slide down.  When the wind started blowing it was more than a little unnerving even for me, but surprisingly Kati seemed more comfortable up there than I felt.  Yet it was totally worth it.  The views were breathtaking.  Check out some of my panoramic shots from the top in our album.  It was an unbelievable day.