St. Elisabeth Cathedral

Image: Wikimedia Commons

The largest church in Slovakia, and one of the easternmost Gothic cathedrals in Europe, rises over the main street of Košice with a roof of glazed colored tiles and a forest of pinnacles, built between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is dedicated to Elizabeth of Hungary, whose feast is today. A king's daughter born in 1207, married young to Louis of Thuringia, she spent her wealth on the hungry, and the legend says that when her husband once stopped her carrying bread to the poor, the bread in her cloak turned to roses. Widowed at twenty, driven from the court, she became a Franciscan tertiary, built a hospital at Marburg and nursed the sick with her own hands until she died in 1231, only twenty-four years old. Her great Gothic winged altar here tells her story in painted panels. Inside you will also find a rare double spiral staircase and the crypt where Francis II Rákóczi was reburied in 1906. A royal saint in a merchant's city, and a reminder that holiness is measured in bread given away.