Via Sancti Martin

The nuns came to the Sopron convent from Győr, and soon after their arrival, they began educating young girls in the town. Then, the first convent church dedicated to the Holy Cross was built. In 1773, this church was visited by Empress Maria Theresa, who also attended a holy mass there. The church, with its shingled spire, had become cramped and dilapidated and was replaced by the neo-Gothic style convent church of today, built-in 1864 to the design of Nándor Handler. The patrons of the church were Countess Emilia Széchenyi and the Flandorffer family. On the façade of the church, which was built in an enclosed street row, above the large Gothic window in the centre is a statue of the church's titular figure, the Immaculate Conception, and in the two corner pillars of the façade are statues of St. Orsolya and St. Angela of Merici. The neo-Gothic tower of the church contains three bells, all three of them the work of the famous Seltenhofer bell foundry from 1863. There are three altars in the neo-Gothic interior of the church, with its three vaulted sections. The neo-Gothic main altar made of oak was a gift from Bishop János Simor to the church. The main altar depicts the Immaculate Conception, the altar wings have reliefs of St. Orsolya and St. Augustine, and the altar also has small statues of King St. Stephen and King St. Lazarus. The famous convent was dissolved in 1948 when 66 sisters were taken away from the convent. The Order of St. Orsolya reestablished itself in the city in the 1990s, but sadly, the sisters' presence in Sopron ceased in 2016 with the death of the last Orsolyite sister of Sopron.