Pécs - Cathedral of St Peter Szent Péter Székesegyház

In the late Roman period there was probably a burial chapel on the site of the present Cathedral; some of the graves on the Early Christian cemetery have been uncovered and can be seen by visitors. In 1064 a fire destroyed the first episcopal church and the adjoining bishop's palace belonging to the diocese which had been founded in 1009. Work on the new diocesan church, a triple-aisled columned basilica with apses on the east side, a raised choir and four corner towers, lasted until well into the 12th C. The building was clearly influenced by North Italian Baroque and the interior furnishings were the work of local sculptors and stone-masons in co-operation with master-builders from Dalmatia - which was then part of the Magyar empire - and Lombardy.

In the 14th and 15th C, after having suffered severe damage in Mongol attacks, the church was given Gothic vaulted roofs in place of the original flat ones. During the Turkish occupation of Pécs it was used as a mosque and its crypt as an arms store. After the Turks withdrew there were plans to convert it in the Baroque style, but it was the mid-1700s before this came to fruition. By the early 19th C, the Cathedral was in extremely poor condition, and the measures carried out under the supervision of the Hungarian architect Mihály Pollack who added a second façade in 1805-30 in an attempt to prevent the outer walls from collapsing, did little to improve matters. Between 1882 and 1891 the church was completely rebuilt, to plans of the Viennese architect Friedrich Schmidt, and the result is what we see today. In accordance with contemporary ideas regarding the preservation of historical buildings, his brief was to reconstruct a supposedly Romanesque cathedral by retaining just the base structure and ground plan while in all other respects producing a completely new Neo-Romanesque edifice. The architect collected together all the existing architectural sculptures and stored them in the lapidarium ; they were used as models by György Zala when he designed the reliefs for the north and south passageways into the crypt. The high-altar is also a copy of the Romanesque original. Some well-known 19th C Hungarian artists contributed to the interior furnishings; they included Károly Antal (the statues of the Apostles on the south front), György Kiss (relief in the tympanum above the south door showing Our Lady surrounded by Hungarian saints), Károly Lotz (frescoes in various chapels) and others. A particularly valuable 16th C item of furnishing is the early 16th C round-arched tabernacle of red marble in the Corpus Christi Chapel on the southwest side of the cathedral, which Bishop György Szathmáry of Pécs later had converted to an altar. In that same chapel stands a brass font (1792) in Hungarian Baroque style. The beautiful alabaster epitaph in the Chapel of Our Lady in the northwest of the cathedral was made in Rome in the 17th C.