Buda Castle

This guide to Buda Castle in Budapest opens with the explosion of September 1686, when a cannonball found the Ottoman garrison's gunpowder store during the siege that ended nearly 150 years of Ottoman rule. It reaches back two centuries earlier to King Matthias Corvinus's Renaissance court, once home to one of Europe's largest libraries, and follows the hill through a second, twentieth-century destruction. Stand in Szent György tér and listen for what survived each ruin.