Cave Church

In front of you a cave opens into the rock of Gellért Hill. Inside is a church, and its story is that of a sanctuary buried alive.

1The healing hermit

The cave is also called St Ivan's Cave. According to tradition, a hermit lived here and healed the sick with thermal water and mud from a small lake by the entrance. That is why St John's Day in June was long regarded here as a day of cures. No record of the hermit survives, but the cave and its waters are very real.

2A church like Lourdes

In the 1920s a group of Hungarian Catholics who had made a pilgrimage to Lourdes wanted to recreate its grotto. To a design by the architect Kálmán Lux, the cave became a chapel, consecrated in 1926. It was entrusted to the Paulines, the only religious order founded in Hungary.

3Walled up

In 1951 the communist regime dissolved the community. The secret police arrested the monks, their superior, Ferenc Vezér, was sentenced to death, and the cave mouth was sealed with a thick concrete wall. For almost forty years, passers-by saw only a blank wall.

The church reopened on 27 August 1989, in the months when communism was collapsing, and the Paulines returned. The wall was not fully demolished, nor the chapel restored, until 1992.

A concrete wall can't erase a cave: it can only hide it for a while.

4What to look for

• The cave mouth, opening into the natural rock and closed by a gate.
• The white stone monument on the rock to the left of the entrance.
• The view of Liberty Bridge and the Gellért Baths below you.