Matthias Church
— — a roof that holds the colour of stained glass.
Not only on a wall.
“A Gothic church on the crown of Castle Hill in Buda, with a tiled roof of Zsolnay ceramic in deep greens, mustards and umbers. Hungarian kings were crowned inside its nave for centuries, and the bell tower carries the morning over the river. From the studio it reads as a building that wears its colour on the outside.
Matthias Church, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Matthias Church stands on Castle Hill in Buda, the western half of Budapest, looking east across the Danube to Pest. Records of a church on the site go back to the eleventh century; the current Gothic structure was largely rebuilt by Frigyes Schulek between 1874 and 1896, on the older walls of a fourteenth-century reconstruction. The official name remains the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary; locals call it Mátyás-templom after King Matthias Corvinus, who held his two weddings here in 1461 and 1476.
The roof is the signature: diamond ceramic tiles from the Zsolnay manufactory in Pécs, laid in green, gold-yellow and brown patterns that read as woven cloth from the river below. Zsolnay's eosin finish, perfected in the 1890s, gave Schulek the palette he wanted for the rebuild. Inside, Bertalan Székely and Károly Lotz painted the walls with frescoes in deep blues and reds. The bell tower rises about eighty metres, one of the tallest spires in the Castle District and a fixed point on the Buda skyline.
The church is open to visitors most days outside services, with admission around 2,500 forints for the nave and a separate ticket for the bell-tower climb. Mass is sung Sunday morning at ten, with the Budapest Choir often performing Liszt's Coronation Mass, written for the 1867 crowning of Franz Joseph here. The square outside opens onto Fisherman's Bastion, the white-stone gallery built alongside Schulek's rebuild between 1895 and 1902, with seven turrets standing for the seven Magyar tribes that settled the basin.