The wall stones
Graveyard stones re-used as masonry, inscribed in three languages.
CC BY-SA 3.0 · André Savetier — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ingo Mehling — CC BY-SA 4.0 · FOTO:Fortepan — ID 61349: Adományozó/Donor: Lencse Zoltán. archive copy at the Wayback Machine — CC BY-SA 3.0
A detached bell tower standing directly beside the cathedral, built in the fourteenth century to carry the **Urban bell** — the largest in eastern Slovakia, cast in 1557 from melted-down cannon. Its oddity is in the walls: more than **thirty stone gravestones** of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries are set into them, some with Latin, Hungarian and German inscriptions. They came from the graveyard that once surrounded the cathedral and was cleared in the eighteenth century — their stones re-used as building material in the tower, and displayed today where they sit in the wall. The tower burned in **1966**; the bell fell and cracked, and everything was then restored and the bell returned to its place. Today the tower houses a small **wax museum** and an exhibition space, and can be climbed. An open arcade of arches was added around it in the 1960s and is used as an open-air gallery. Note: the visit is short by nature — twenty minutes, and it is combined with the cathedral it stands beside.
Graveyard stones re-used as masonry, inscribed in three languages.
It fell and cracked in the 1966 fire, and was returned to its place.
Arches added in the 1960s, used as an open-air gallery.
Hlavná, beside the cathedral, Košice
The square is Košice''s single most important sight — about **a kilometre** long and spindle-shaped, widening at the middle, and one of the largest preserved historic centres in Slovakia. Along that one strip you find: **St Elisabeth''s Cathedral**, **Urban''s Tower**, the small **St Michael''s Chapel** in the middle, the **State Theatre** with its neo-Renaissance front, the **Singing Fountain** before it, the baroque **plague column**, and dozens of palaces and coloured burgher houses. All are **free from the outside** and need no more than an hour at an easy pace. ⚠ The whole street is pedestrian and its cafés put chairs out in summer — it suits an evening best.
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