Roman Catholic Church in Zebegény

The Church-Building Committee established in 1883 in the settlement north of Budapest on the banks of the Danube originally commissioned László Gyalus to design a new Catholic church. A marshy plot in the center of the village was purchased as the building site; it was later filled in, and the nearby stream was diverted into a constructed stone channel. Although a fundraising campaign was launched to cover the costs, construction did not begin.

In 1907, the reconstituted committee was joined—representing the summer residents of Zebegény—by architect Dénes Györgyi and József Bartóky, a secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture. Károly Kós was a frequent guest of both families in Zebegény.

“Toward the end of spring I received the official commission to design and supervise the construction of the Zebegény church. Two colleagues—both summer residents of Zebegény—were assigned to work alongside me: Béla Jánszky and Dénes Györgyi. In this capacity, however, my fellow architects did not cause much disturbance (which I did not mind). In the execution of the church, only Jánszky’s architectural contribution became effective, insofar as the external form and spire of the upper part of the tower were not realized according to my original design but according to his modification—which, in my opinion, is more aesthetically successful than mine.”

— Károly Kós: Autobiography, ed. Samu Benkő, Szépirodalmi Könyvkiadó–Kriterion, Budapest–Bucharest, 1991, p. 84.

The preliminary design was submitted to the committee on 4 August 1908. Acceptance of the innovative proposal did not proceed smoothly. Dénes Györgyi succeeded in convincing the committee by declaring that the church would be built in a “Romanesque style.” It likely also posed a difficulty that the principal designer, Károly Kós, was of the Reformed faith. This issue was circumvented by listing Béla Jánszky’s name first on the design drawings.

On 10 September 1908, a preliminary cost estimate was submitted, totaling 41,884 crowns. The construction contract was signed by Károly Melczer Jr., a master builder from Budapest (who had also built Varjúvár in Sztána), and was approved by the Ecclesiastical Authority on 29 September. The ceremonial laying of the foundation stone took place on 12 September, and earthworks had already begun on 8 September.

Under the guidance and supervision of the two architect-designers, construction progressed at a steady pace. The designs for the furnishings—high altar, pulpit, pews, and stained-glass windows—were prepared by Károly Kós. The completed church was solemnly consecrated on 31 July 1910. Further furnishing and interior painting proceeded more slowly. The wall paintings of the interior were executed in 1914 by students of the School of Applied Arts, under the direction of Aladár Körösfői-Kriesch, founder of the Gödöllő Artists’ Colony, following designs by and with the collaboration of assistant instructor György Leszkovszky.

The early sketches of the project reinterpret the small Romanesque rural stone church. The restriction of rubble-stone masonry to the plinth marks a departure from the rustic character of the original sketches. The completed church’s simply treated, asymmetrical main façade may be compared to contemporary international examples such as Lars Sonck’s Tampere Cathedral in Finland (1902–1907).

Insight into the interior space is provided by Béla Jánszky’s description published in April 1910:

“We therefore retained the perfect Romanesque arrangement of three naves and a single sanctuary. The walls of the main nave are supported by two pairs of strong columns set between broad arches, while the ceiling is of a new system: double timber beams carry flat plaster slab ceilings, into which colored windows are set. Everywhere there are large, scarcely divided planes, well suited to the placement of more modern decorative paintings. The remaining innovations are purely formal in nature. Our intention was solely to introduce practically oriented innovations into the building’s structure. The pursuit of economy, moreover, led us to various new ideas in materials and forms.”

— Béla Jánszky: The Zebegény Church, in Zászlónk, Vol. VIII, no. 8, 1910, pp. 172–175.

According to Anthony Gall, the decorative painting executed in 1914 does not take into account the architectural and spatial innovations of the interior and fails to serve the space’s architectural modernity. Gall suggests that the architects likely did not discuss the interior design in detail with the painters during the design process. Only permit-level drawings of the church survive, in which key aspects of the interior appear only schematically or differ from the realized form. Gall argues that the carpentry structure, light wall surfaces, and stained-glass windows together produced a genuinely modern, finished work of architecture.