Late baroque greek-cross plan type Lutheran churches in Hungary

Abstract

The paper analyses a specific building type, the Baroque church architecture of historic Hungary, the Greek-cross ground-plan evangelic churches. This church type has different prototypes: the Huguenot and Scandinavian Protestant churches in Europe, the model plans of architectural treatises - first of all the treatises of Leonhard Christoph Sturm - and the Lutheran wooden churches of Silesia. The symbolic content of the cruciform plan was also popular among the Lutheran congregations, which is explainable with theological reasons as well as with the good visual and acoustic conditions, furthermore with the construction benefits from its application. The Slovak Lutheran congregations played a determining role in the domestication and the dissemination of the layout type. The late Baroque central Greek-cross plan is an important antecedent for the renewal of the late 19^th century Protestant church architecture.