Perpetual Adoration church (Ferencvárosi Örökimádás Templom) on Ulloi Street

by Victor Grigore, Webphoto.ro

The Ulloi Street is the longest boulevard in Budapest, going from the neighborhood that is famous for the Ferencvaros football stadium to the center. The catholic church dedicated to the Perpetual Adoration is eclipsed by other more famous churches in town, but is worth paying a visit to. It is built in the neo-Gothic style, with decorated high stone spires. The interior is a long nave with vaulted arches that direct the look of the visitor to the colorful stained glass windows in the back of the altar. The shape of the spires is reproduced at lower scale in the altar that incorporates a statue of the Virgin Mary.

Much like the classical style of the antiquity, the Gothic is perceived a bit distorted by the modern man. As the Greek statues were in fact colorful and not perfectly white and with an air of solemnity, the Gothic also was more vivid than the gray image we get when entering a cathedral whose walls are now black from smoke and air pollution. The Neogothic manages to return this breath of life to the traditional cathedrals and palaces of Europe, with a modern interpretation that went through Romanticism, a period that idealized the historic past and the impetus of the barbaric ancestors. Thus, churches like this one, or like the Szeged cathedral, built in the XIX and XX century, with their white walls and large windows give us a Romantic glimpse of what Gothic aimed at achieving in its Medieval age.