St. Stephen's Basilica

Yesterday I felt unwell so I didn't write any posts. Let's carry on today then. With Free Budapest Walking Tour, we passed through St. Stephen's Basilica. The tour guide told us stories about the church and then let us take pictures with the church. Here are some of the pictures.

The church from different angles:








Some details of the statues...



We didn't get inside the church at that time, but we did go inside on a different day. I think we paid around 200 HUF each to get in (around €0.75) but it wasn't a guided tour and we just put the money in the offering box in front of the main chapel, so we just looked around the place ourselves. You have to pay a separate fee to get up to the tower to take a look from there, but our tour guide told us that we shouldn't have bothered 'coz during the trip we would go up to Castle Hill area where we could take better pics of the city from there. I'll write about Castle Hill district in a separate post.

Here are some pics of the inside of the church (they still use the church for masses):







Then we went to a chapel, a room behind the one on the above pictures. However, we couldn't take pictures using flash in that room.



Wonder what's in the above "cabinet"? It's St. Stephen's mummified fist. If you wanna see it clearly, you have to pay (put some money inside a box and then the cabinet would be lit up for 2 minutes). We didn't pay the money - instead we waited for another tourist to do it, but still I couldn't really see it too clearly. If you want to see a clear picture of the mummified fist, click on this link.

The story goes that when St. Stephen's body was dug up, they found out that only his right hand was mummified, so some people thought it was a divine miracle, though experts offer a different POV using science as a method to explain why only that hand is mummified. The hand was cut off into three parts and Hungary got the fist (I think the other part goes to Vienna, but I forgot where the last part goes to).


On the left hand side of the church (I mean if you walk out of the church itself, then it's the left side street) there's a gelato shop, so we went there to get some. A small flower-shaped gelato with 2 flavours cost 350 HUF (around €1.30) whereas a medium flower-shaped gelato with 3 flavours cost 450 HUF (around 1.70). I chose chocolate (in the middle) and raspberry. It was DELICIIOUUUSSS!!! :-D

Here's a pic of both our ice-cream:


OK, I'll end this post here before it gets too long ha ha ha...