The St. Catherine of Alexandria Church (, ) is a Roman Catholic church in the Tabán quarter of Budapest, Hungary. It is the parish church of the Tabán Parish which also comprises parts of Gellért Hill and Naphegy. The church is a listed monument that was built in Central European Baroque style between 1728 and 1777. It was reconstructed several times in the 19th–20th centuries.
History
Early history
The southern part of the Lower Town between Castle Hill and Gellért Hill was devastated by the Siege of Buda in 1686. The area had few inhabitants until November 1690 when a group of South Slavic refugees were resettled there by the Cameral Administration. The majority of the new arrivals were Orthodox Serbs who built their own quarter on the banks of the Ördög-árok stream. Their chapel later became the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity. The Roman Catholics settled on the southern slopes of Castle Hill and near the Danube around the Mosque of Sokollu Mustafa Pasha which survived the war.
In 1689 the head of the Cameral Administration of Buda, Johann Stephan Werlein asked the Franciscans of Bosna Argentina, who had a house in the Víziváros district, to take on the pastoral care of the Catholic Slavs who lived in the area. The Franciscan fathers already had a presence in Buda during the Ottoman period, and they spoke the Illyric language. The Mosque of Sokollu Mustafa Pasha was converted to a chapel in 1692 and it was consecrated to St. Catherine of Alexandria. A house was built by the chapel for the friar who settled there in 1693. The friar also served as a schoolmaster because the Franciscans built a school on the edge of the cemetery which had been established around the chapel. This small stone building had a single room, and a few shops provided income for its maintenance. The Cameral Administration has granted approval to finish the construction of these shops on 31 May 1697.
The medieval parish was re-established in 1702, and its patron became the Council of Buda according to the 1703 letter of privilege of the town. The guardian of the Víziváros friary served as parish priest but actual pastoral care was entrusted to a Franciscan administrator who lived in the Tabán district. The baptismal register was started in 1692, marriage and burial records have been kept from 1709. In 1706 the council granted a 2.3 ha vineyard on Gellért Hill to the parish.
A drawing from 1721 documented the Baroque reconstruction of the converted mosque. The original dome was replaced by a steep conical roof, the upper part of the minaret was demolished to the height of the main building and the remaining part was topped with a belfry and an ornate spire. A porch was built in front of the entrance door. The chapel had four bells: two older ones and two new bells that were cast in 1723 by Jacob Nosbicher, a bellmaker in Pest. The new bells were dedicated to Apostles Matthias and Thomas, and the Virgin Mary.
The Baroque church
Tabán quickly became the most densely populated quarter of Buda in the first decades of the 18th century in spite of the several natural disasters and epidemics that hit the district. The number and percentage of the Catholic population also increased. In 1702 there were only 250 Catholics among the taxpayer heads of families (the Orthodox Serbs numbered 461) but the canonical visitation in 1756 found more than 4000 Catholics in Tabán. Their number grew to almost 5000 in 1802. At first almost all of them were Illyrs (South Slavs) but German immigrants arrived in large numbers from the 1720s. In 1783 the Germans already outnumbered the Illyrs while the Hungarians and the Slovaks were still few in numbers. From the middle of the 18th century sermons were delivered in German and Illyric, and teaching in the parish school was also bilingual.
The Franciscan presence in the district also increased as one more friar settled in the small Tabán parish house in 1732. The old house was replaced by a more spacious building next to the church in 1759. The six room house was large enough to accommodate three friars from 1770 on. A new schoolhouse was bought in 1756 where secular schoolmasters taught. From 1757 the Franciscan house in the Víziváros district (and the friars of the Tabán parish) belonged to new Province of St. John Capistrano. The majority of the friars, who served the parish in the 18th century, were Illyrs (Croatians).