Arpan K. Banerjee
Solihull, England
In the Buda Castle district of the city of Budapest, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, there is an elegant square in front of the famous centuries-old Matthias Church with its imposing Gothic spire. This site was a mosque during the Ottoman invasion before being rebuilt as a church in a Baroque style in the eighteenth century, and then again in a Gothic style in the nineteenth century. The church has hosted coronations of Hungarian royalty for hundreds of years.
The recently renovated Ministry of Finance building, originally built over a hundred years ago, forms the northern part of the elegant square. The southeastern aspect of the square leads to the fairytale appearance of the neo-Romanesque stone turrets of the Fisherman’s Bastion fortress with magnificent views over the River Danube.
At the center of Holy Trinity Square, or Plaza Szentháromság, is a large hexagonal plague column with a statue of the Holy Trinity at the top built between 1710–1713. Philippe Ungleich from the city of Wurzburg, Germany designed the nine statues of this column in a Baroque style. Anton Horner, an Austro-Hungarian, was the co-sculptor of the column.
The column was built to commemorate the victims of the 1691 and 1701 outbreaks of the second plague pandemic that swept through Europe. The erection of this column not only commemorated the dead but was also thought to help prevent further outbreaks. Plague columns similar to this can be seen in Vienna and Munich.
The Trinity column is thought to be one of the finest monuments of its kind. The pinnacle of the monument depicts the Holy Trinity of the Catholic faith: God the Father with a scepter, the Son with the Cross of redemption, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove. The column also depicts patron saints of healing and virtue, including Saint Sebastian, the plague saint, whose body pierced with arrows represents the suffering of disease.
The column was sadly destroyed during World War 2 but was meticulously rebuilt in 1967. The original sculptures of the monument can be seen in the Kiscelli Museum of Óbuda in the third district of Budapest. The statues on the current column are exact replicas.
Courtesy of Ms. Shiuli Banerjee.
Courtesy of Dr. Arpan K. Banerjee.
Courtesy of Dr. Arpan K. Banerjee.
DR. ARPAN K. BANERJEE qualified in medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School. London. He was a consultant radiologist in Birmingham 1995–2019. He was President of the radiology section of the RSM 2005–2007 and on the scientific committee of the Royal College of Radiologists 2012–2016. He was Chairman of the British Society for the History of Radiology 2012–2017. He is Chairman of ISHRAD. He is author/co-author of papers on a variety of clinical, radiological, and medical historical topics and eight books, including Classic Papers in Modern Diagnostic Radiology (2005) and The History of Radiology (OUP 2013).