Catholic Church Architecture and Oriental Forms in Interwar Hungary

Text: Tamás Kiss

Europe, with its Greco-Roman foundations and Christian religious and cultural roots, has been curiously looking to the East for inspiration ever since the Middle Ages. The encounters between Eastern and European civilizations have resulted in numerous architectural interactions over the centuries, to varying degrees throughout the different periods. The first encounter between the Islamic world and Western Greco-Christian cultures dates back to the time of the First Crusades, which were launched back in 1096; the Gothic arches of medieval cathedrals, which are closely related to their typical equivalents in Islamic architecture, are derived from this period, but the polychrome banding technique of our medieval European churches also follows the Islamic technique of ablaq. Islamic architectural features also appear all over in European church architecture around the 17^th century. The third meeting of the two civilizations occurred in the 19th century. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Romantic period saw the construction of a wide variety of buildings designed in the Moorish style, which used oriental forms and accents. In European architecture, certain orientalising elements were present as a kind of oriental ‘spice’ between the two world wars, and these also appeared in Hungary.