Elizabeth Lookout

This guide to Elizabeth Lookout traces why a tower crowns Budapest's highest hill: Empress Elisabeth of Austria and Hungary, known as Sisi, kept escaping her own palace to climb here in the 1880s and 1890s, and after her assassination in 1898 hotel owners raised money for a monument in her honor. You'll hear how architect Frigyes Schulek reworked the plans and how, decades later, Hungary's communist government left its own mark on the tower's crown. A later chapter follows what it took to undo that.