(Being part the third of my adventures in Budapest. With photo links! These open new browser windows.)
In Wicca, sacred space is something you delineate, temporarily, for a specific purpose. When you’re done, you open up the circle and return the site to its everyday use. And while some of us tend to use the same places over and over, it’s not because of anything inherent about the places themselves. It’s because of something inherent about us.
Likewise, there are certain places, and certain kinds of buildings, that I respond to. I’m sure I’m not the only one.
The evening of my arrival in Budapest, after a brief nap, I, my cousins Eleanor and Elizabeth, and Eleanor’s fiancé, headed over to the Buda side, to the Temple of St. Matthias. To get there, we went from Metro to bus in a confusing profusion of conveyances. Fortunately, Eleanor had bought us weekly passes—get one of these things, put your name on it, and use it to ride any public transit anywhere in Budapest for a week. Show it to the random spot-check ticket-taker if asked, but otherwise board with impunity. (Budapest’s mass-transit system is probably the most efficient I’ve ever encountered, though at the time of my first ride on it I was too tired and overwhelmed to notice.)
The temple is also called the Coronation Church, although few coronations have ever been held there. Parts of it date to the 14th century, but what you see now is largely late 19th century construction and reconstruction. The outside is a profusion of gothic architecture, along with multicolored roof tiles made of porcelain. Nearby is a statue of St. Stephen, complete with the bent cross on his crown, and a wall overlooking the Duna called Fisherman’s Bastion. Of course my first sight of all of these was at night, so at the time I noticed few details. Later in the week, we went back for a longer visit.
That night, we were there for a concert. My uncle, Eleanor’s father, was supposed to join us, but would be arriving late because his flight from L.A. departed late (the attendants were stuck in traffic—really), causing him to miss his connection. He had, nonetheless, scored tickets for the rest of us, so we were treated to a night of Bach and Verdi sacred music, performed by a chorus and a high school orchestra that was better than many university ensembles I’ve heard, in an absolutely beautiful church.
I saw a lot of lovely buildings in Budapest, but this church was my favorite, I think. Inside, columns grow like trees into soaring gothic arches, and every interior surface is painted in blue and red and gold. The decorative style reflects the many cultural influences Hungary has been subject to. Images of saints and angels illustrate the country’s Christian past and present (I believe that Catholicism is the dominant denomination just now, though I could be wrong), but the patterns and organic decorations that give the walls the appearance of a sunlight-dappled forest are Byzantine, or possibly Turkish (Budapest was under Turkish rule for a time, during the Ottoman period). Although it’s fairly large, with many columns, the lines of sight are excellent. When we arrived, all of the chairs on the floor were taken, so we sat on a set of stone steps at the rear (having entered from one side) and had a lovely view of the proceedings.
Many churches are triumphs of acoustical design. When you consider that their architects had to deal with reflective surfaces and a lack of electronic amplification, the achievement is even more impressive, and the Temple of St. Matthias is no exception. Not quite up to a modern concert hall, perhaps, but impressive nonetheless.
Getting back to our lodgings, we experienced one of the more entertaining vicissitudes of Budapest mass transit: people will cram in as tightly as they can, and in fact the guidebooks warn you to beware of pickpockets for this very reason. We all jammed onto a bus heading back across the river, packed in so snugly that, when the doors opened again, the woman standing next to me nearly fell out. Most of the people I met were about my size (I’m pretty small) and I could see where that might be an advantage. Claustrophobics, however, would not enjoy it.
We returned home to Kossuth Lajus utca 5, and met my uncle John, who had arrived at last. He’s my father’s brother, and they look sufficiently alike that when people throughout the week asked how I was related to the family, I’d tell them, “My dad’s John’s brother—the guy who looks like him.” There’s a sort of Williams Look in our family, though some of us have it more than others. (Me, I look enough like my dad that when I was born, my mom’s mother apparently took one look at me and said, “That’s a Williams.” Hence my name, which I shared with two other people at the wedding, a novel experience. I’m not used to having the same name as anyone nearby.)
We returned to the temple during the day later that week, and I got to examine the paintings more closely, look at some museum holdings upstairs, and buy a pamphlet on the church for a few bucks. Something in people is geared to respond to certain environmental stimuli, and I think that’s why churches and other buildings set apart and designated as sacred look the way they do.
It’s still impressive.