Detailed description of the building

Around the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century the inhabitants of Buda were being decimated by repeated bouts of the plague. At the time a wealthy burgher living on the Castle Hill, the master chimney-sweep Peter Paul Franczin, made a vow: should he and his family escape he will go on pilgrimage to the shrine of the Blood-weeping Virgin in the North-Italian Vigezzo Valley. He returned to Buda on foot with a copy of the relic from that shrine. He had a wooden chapel known as "Blood Chapel" built to house it. In the fire of 1723 the chapel burnt down, but the picture survived this intact. By 1795 a new, considerably larger church was already needed, whose foundation-stone was laid on the 13th September of that year and which was completed in two years. The beautiful pictures for the side-altars - St Anne, Mater Dolorosa, St John Nepomuk and Mary-Magdalene - were added between 1811-1815. The "Greatest Hungarian" Count Stephen Széchenyi got married here in 1836, and the "Saviour of Mothers", Dr Ignatius Semmelweiss in 1857. The church received its current shape by its brilliant extension in 1940.

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