Story
The story of Church of the Assumption, Szentendre
Why is a cathedral in a small Hungarian town called Belgrade Cathedral? Serbs fleeing the Ottoman advance settled in Szentendre, the first larger groups after the fall of Belgrade in 1521 and many more around 1690, during the Great Migration of the Serbs. The settlers from Belgrade built their cathedral in stone, and the name has stuck ever since.
In 1696 Patriarch Arsenije III Crnojević hoped to base himself in Pest; when that was refused, the Serbian Orthodox Eparchy of Buda was set up here instead, and this church is still its cathedral. The present Baroque building went up between 1756 and 1763 on the site of an older church, and the bell tower was added in 1777. At 48 metres it is the tallest tower in Szentendre. Inside, look for the Rococo iconostasis made in 1781 by Vasilije Ostojić.
Next door stand the bishop's palace and the Serbian Orthodox ecclesiastical art museum.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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