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St. Stephen’s

Square

The heart of the county

In 1718, there was a shadoof with a bucket in the centre of
Csaba, surrounded by the huts of just 22 Hungarian famili-
es. On one August day, nearly 700 Slovak colonists arrived
on horse-drawn carts from ten counties of Upper Hungary
at today’s St. Stephen’s Square.
Today, the Town Hall stands in the centre of the square,
which was built between 1871 and 1873 according to the
plans of Ernő Sztraka, the main architect of the town, and
its romantic façade was designed by Miklós Ybl. Opposi-
te the Town Hall, the Fiume Hotel and the former Réthy
Farmacy are located. To the west, a mansion and Saint An-
thony of Padua’s Cathedral are found; the church is a typical
sight of the cityscape of Békéscsaba. The red-brick, two-

tower, neo-Gothic-style building attained its present form

in 1910.
By the summer of 2013, the renovation of Békéscsaba’s ma-
in square, the Szent István (St. Stephen’s) Square, was com-
pleted and the statue of St. Stephen was consecrated in 2018.
In the centre of Békéscsaba, there are two Lutheran church-
es facing each other. The Great Church is the largest Lu-

theran church in Central Europe, built from the public do-

nations of the inhabitants. The church is grandiose, with a
seating capacity of 4,000, a height of 80 meters (as tall as a
30-storey house), and the thickness of the walls reaches 2
meters at its foundation.

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