Gellért Hill

This guide to Gellért Hill in Budapest opens with the eleventh-century killing of Bishop Gerard, a Venetian monk invited to Hungary by King Stephen, seized near the river after the king's death. It follows the hill's later turn as an Austrian imperial stronghold, built by Hungarian forced labor after the 1848 uprising, its sixty cannons trained on the city below. The fortress fired those cannons only once, for an emperor's birthday.