Gellért Hill History

The Celtic Eravisci held this hilltop in the first century AD, until Rome moved them down into the civitas Eraviscorum on the plain below. The rock was useful long before it was decorative.

In 1046 Bishop Gerard, an Italian-born missionary at the centre of Hungary’s early Christian state, was thrown from the slope facing the Danube during the pagan uprising associated with Vata. From the fifteenth century the hill was increasingly called after him.

Under Ottoman rule a timber palisade on the summit replaced the chapel, and the hill took the name of Gürz Elias, a Muslim holy man buried there. Then, at Palatine Joseph’s initiative, something quite different: an astronomical observatory, the Csillagda, built from 1813 and inaugurated in 1815 in front of Emperor Francis I, King Frederick William III of Prussia and Tsar Alexander I. It lasted barely three decades, destroyed in the siege of Buda in May 1849.

At the foot of the rock, meanwhile, people lived in the caves. A photograph from about 1874 shows a cave dwelling on the site where the Cave Church was later made.

After the defeat of the War of Independence the Habsburg military command resolved on a ring of forts around the city, and the hill was the obvious first one. Construction began in 1850 at General Haynau’s order, to designs by Ignaz Weisz, overseen by the Austrian military engineer Emanuel Zitta, with Mátyás Zitterbarth winning the building commission on the cheapest bid. Even Adam Clark, who built the Chain Bridge, put in a proposal. By 1854 imperial troops were in place.

The building was done in Sóskút limestone, delivered by Antal Hofhauser’s firm, with Tardos red limestone coping, in alternating courses of brick and stone. Some 2,500 cubic metres of stone and earth went down the hillside on rail carts.

It did not hold its purpose for long. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 its military importance declined rapidly, and within a generation Hungarians were arguing about what to do with it.

Count István Széchenyi had proposed a national pantheon on the hill in the 1840s. His son Ödön revived the idea after the Compromise, and a national competition followed in 1871. Gyula Berczik won it with a domed Byzantine building, Frigyes Feszl came second, and the other entries included a fairytale castle by Gyula Kolbenheyer and Sándor Straub, a pyramid whose author is not certain, and a Hungaria statue in the manner of the Acropolis by Adolf Wilhelm. Not one stone was laid.

What happened instead was simpler. When the imperial garrison withdrew in 1899, the citizens of Budapest started pulling the walls down themselves. The money ran out before the work was finished, which is why the fortress still has a V-shaped gap above its former main gate, now called the Great Gate. There is a lookout there today, facing north.

For the first half of the twentieth century the fortress drifted. It held police housing at times, and at others it was a notorious slum and a refuge for criminals. Between the wars the hill around it was landscaped in the English manner, with rock gardens, scenic roads and the fortress floodlit for the first time.

The war put it back in uniform. A bunker and anti-aircraft positions went into the courtyard and the casemates took the wounded, and in February 1945 the Citadella fell to Soviet troops after the siege of Budapest. The structure was damaged in several places and the scars of gunfire are still in the walls.

In 1947 Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl’s monument went up on the eastern end of the hill, forty metres from the ground to the top, with the fourteen-metre bronze Genius at its centre. It was the Liberation Monument then, and a figure of a Soviet soldier stood with it. During the 1956 revolution that soldier was toppled, and later political changes removed further Soviet references.

The Kádár era organised volunteer campaigns to dismantle the combat-damaged parts, then changed its mind. By the 1960s the fortress was a protected monument, and tourist facilities, restaurants and viewing terraces followed, with new access roads, a promenade and a city bus route to bring people up. In 1987 it joined Budapest’s UNESCO World Heritage listing.

After 1989 the ideological functions went and the maintenance went with them. Visitor numbers rose while the fabric fell apart, and privatisation brought a run of temporary bars and venues inside the walls. The city wanted a tourist destination, residents wanted a public park, and for thirty years neither happened.

Work finally began in autumn 2020, with archaeology that turned up the remains of the 1815 observatory, a First World War anti-aircraft gun mount and unexploded ordnance the Hungarian Defence Forces had to clear. Structurally unsound sections of wall were taken down and rebuilt by the original methods with the same stones. The interiors of the round bastion and the central courtyard were cleared of later additions to restore the original plan, new entrances were cut through the walls and lifts put into every level.

The architectural concept is Dániel Taraczky’s, of the art1st design studio, and the idea was to separate the “head” of tyranny, the Western Round Bastion, from the body of the fortress so that the space between them could be opened to the city. It reopened on 5 April 2026.