title: TR-85

text: The armour of the TR-85M1 tank has a maximum thickness of 200 mm (multilayered) for the hull and 320 + 20 mm add-on armour on the turret. However, the armour is sloped and gives a total of 580mm or RHAe. The 20 mm add-on armour on the front of the turret has a modular appearance with a triangular profile. Although it might look like bricks of explosive reactive armour, the add-on composite armour is designed this way for easy replacement after combat damage. The tank also has side skirts as a protection against shaped charges. The metal side skirts have three holes each that form steps for the crew to reach the roof hatches. On the sides of the turret there are ammunition boxes for the heavy antiaircraft DShK machine gun. The upper glacis plate has two track segments, while the lower glacis plate can be fitted with steel screens or a mine roller. The TR-85M1 tank also has NBC protection and an improved, rapid fire suppression system using non-toxic agents. The system, designed by L'Hotellier, protects both the crew and the engine compartment using halon. The modernized version adds a mine protection plate and a bar for the driver, which increases protection against mines and improvised explosive devices. Also, the older TR-85 tanks have a conventional driver's seat bolted on the floor, whereas the M1 version has a parachute-harness like arrangement. In this way, the driver has no contact with the hull except on the pedals and is out of the shockwave area of exploding land mines or IEDs.


title: TR-85

text: The main armament of the TR-85M1 is the 100 mm A308 rifled tank gun (an adaptation of the M1977 towed anti-tank gun made by Arsenal Reșița) that was also fitted to the TR-77 tanks. The TR-85M1 has a rate of fire of about 4-7 rounds per minute and can carry up to 41 projectiles inside the tank. The gun barrel is fitted with a bore evacuator and has a thermal sleeve. The TR-85 tanks use a manual loader. The modernized version has a number of improvements to increase the reliability of the gun. The hydraulic buffer was improved by replacing the rubber sealing and the electroerosion of the chrome layer from the hydraulic buffer and recuperator has been removed by changing the design and manufacturing process.


title: TR-85

text: The gun can fire APFSDS-T (BM-421 Sg), shaped charge (BK-412R and BK-5M), high explosive (OF-412), armour piercing with tracer (ballistic-capped BR-412B and BR-412D) and target practice (PBR-412 and PBR-421B) rounds. There was also an APFSDS round that is no longer in production. To increase the firepower of the TR-85 tank, the BM-421 Sg round (known internationally as the M309 cartridge) was developed in cooperation with Israel as part of the modernizing program begun in 1996. Made by Aeroteh SA from Bucharest and marketed by ROMARM SA, the BM-421 Sg projectile can penetrate 444 mm of RHAe at 90° at 500 meters, 425 mm at 1000 meters and 328 mm at 4000 meters.


title: TR-85

text: The TR-85M1 is equipped with the local-made "Ciclop-M" (Cyclops-M, M stands for modernized) ballistic fire-control system (FCS) computer, a third generation FCS and an improvement of the prior, second generation, "Ciclop" FCS (used on the TR-85 version and equipped with an Intel 8080 microprocessor, 1 ko of random-access memory (RAM) and 12 ko of system memory). According to the manual of the Ciclop-M fire control system, the ballistic solution generated ensures a hit percentage greater than 95% for a target under 2000 meters and greater than 75% for a target between 2000 and 3000 meters. Also, the Ciclop-M can be used to aim at a target located up to 6 km away with the OF-421 high explosive round, up to 5 km away for the BM-421 Sg APFSDS-T round, 4 km for the armour-piercing ammunition (AP-T) rounds and up to 3 km for the high-explosive anti-tank (HEAT) rounds. The coaxial machine gun can be aimed at a maximum distance of 2 km using the FCS of the tank.


title: TR-85

text: The gun is electrically stabilized on two axes by the EADS computer aided stabilization system. The new stabilization system improves the accuracy of the main gun and reduces the target engagement time, turret temperature, noise, fire hazard and maintenance. The turret has RKS rolling-element bearings (roller bearings) to ensure better stabilising of the A308 gun. The gunner's day sight telescopic periscope features an integrated laser rangefinder (200 m to 5.000 m measurement distance) and an electronic reticle. Above the gun barrel there is a SAGEM MATIS thermal viewer designed to operate at wavelengths between 3 and 5 μm in the spectral band. Initially, the TR-85 M1 tanks had an inferior SAGEM ALIS thermal viewer (8-12 μm in the spectral band) for the gunner, now present in export configurations. The driver has an AONP-I passive night sight, which is also the standard night vision device for the gunner on the older TR-85 tanks. The commander has a "Société Française des Instruments de Mesure" (SFIM) EC2−55R panoramic sight with a second generation SAGEM image intensification system that can be independently directed to the target.


title: TR-85

text: The original TR-85 was powered by the 830 horsepower 8VS-A2T2, 4 stroke, 8-cylinder, liquid-cooled, turbo charged direct injection diesel engine, and a six speed (four forward, two reverse) THM-5800 hydromechanic transmission (engaging under load, one power flow in straight run and two power flows in turns with planetary final transmission), giving it a governed top speed of 50 km/h on paved roads. The TR-85M1 has an improved version of the original engine. The new 8VS-A2T2M provides 860 horsepower and has a top road speed of 60 km/h. However, because the weight of the tank increased from 42 tons to 50 tons, the power-to-weight ratio has been reduced from 19.7 to 17.2 hp/tonne. The tank has a maximum road range of about 400 km and can be fitted with two optional 200-liter drum-type fuel tanks at the rear of the vehicle for an increased operational range. Like the T-54/55 series, the TR-85 has an unditching beam and a snorkel (to allow river crossings) mounted at the rear of the hull. To meet the power demands of the new equipment, a Kollmorgen generating set has been installed. The new power generation system provides 20 kW of stable voltage.


title: TR-85

text: The TR-85 tanks have a torsion bar suspension. The modernized version also has eight telescopic hydro-gas shock-absorbers to increase the overall speed. The running gear consists of six dual rubber-tyred road wheels and four return rollers per side, with the idler wheel at the front and drive sprocket at the rear. The first two road wheels have characteristic, prominent gaps between them and the rest of the road wheels. The tank has two bolt tracks with metal-rubber articulations. The M1 version has aluminum alloy road wheels. The braking system has been improved by replacing the old wet multi-disc brakes with dry multi-disc brakes and the old hydraulic system with a new servomechanism.


title: TR-85

text: The TR-85 has a typical tank layout: driver's compartment at the front, fighting compartment in the center and engine compartment in the rear. The four-man crew consists of the commander, driver, gunner and loader. The driver's hatch is on the front left of the hull roof. The commander is seated on the left side of the turret, with the gunner to his front and the loader on the right. The TR-85 has a cramped crew compartment, a trait of the T-54/55 series. Although it has an extended chassis, the extra space is used by the larger engine. The TR-85M1 also has a turret bustle, but this does not help crew comfort because of the added equipment in the modernized version. Although there are no height limits for tank recruits in the Romanian Army, the recommended maximum height is 1.68m as in practice anyone taller must sit in an uncomfortable position with limited physical movement. The communication system consists of HF and UHF transceivers with intelligent frequency hopping and encryption. The crew has an intercom with 4+1 stations.


title: TR-85

text: The TR-85 tank has been referred to in Western sources as the TM-800, M1978 or Model 1978 and TR-800. The Romanian Army currently uses only the TR-85 and TR-85M1 designations. However, the early prototypes of the TR-85M1 were known as the TR-85M or TR-85M1A. The add-on armour of these tanks had a different shape and was welded. Also, the turret bustle had a different shape and the bore evacuator had a different position. A TR-85M1A variant is currently on display at the National Military Museum in Bucharest.


title: TR-85

text: In 2002, a TR-85M1 tank was tested with a V12 Iveco 1200 hp engine, but did not enter production. The prototype was referred to as the TR-85M2 tank in some sources, however there is no proof that the Romanian Army ever used this designation.


title: TR-85

text: In 2007, when the DMT-85M1 was developed, there were also plans for other derivative vehicles based on the TR-85M1 chassis, including an armored recovery vehicle version and an armoured vehicle-launched bridge. These variants are currently in development.


title: Old Japanese

text: Old Japanese was an early member of the Japonic language family. No genetic links to other language families have been proven.


title: Old Japanese

text: Old Japanese was written using man'yōgana, using Chinese characters as syllabograms or (occasionally) logograms. It featured a few phonemic differences from later forms, such as a simpler syllable structure and distinctions between several pairs of syllables that have been pronounced identically since Early Middle Japanese. The phonetic realization of these distinctions is uncertain. Internal reconstruction points to a pre-Old Japanese phase with fewer consonants and vowels.


title: Old Japanese

text: As is typical of Japonic languages, Old Japanese was primarily an agglutinative language with a subject–object–verb word order, adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modified and auxiliary verbs and particles appended to the main verb. Unlike in later periods, Old Japanese adjectives could be used uninflected to modify following nouns.


title: Old Japanese

text: Old Japanese is usually defined as the language of the Nara period (710–794), when the capital was Heijō-kyō (now Nara).


title: Old Japanese

text: That is the period of the earliest connected texts in Japanese, the 112 songs included in the "Kojiki" (712).


title: Old Japanese

text: The other major literary sources of the period are the 128 songs included in the "Nihon Shoki" (720) and the "Man'yōshū" (c. 759), a compilation of over 4,500 poems.


title: Old Japanese

text: Shorter samples are 25 poems in the "Fudoki" (720) and the 21 poems of the "Bussokuseki-kahi" (c. 752).


title: Old Japanese

text: The latter has the virtue of being an original inscription, whereas the oldest surviving manuscripts of all the other texts are the results of centuries of copying, with the attendant risk of scribal errors.


title: Old Japanese

text: Prose texts are more limited but are thought to reflect the syntax of Old Japanese more accurately than verse texts do. The most important are the 27 ('liturgies') recorded in the "Engishiki" (compiled in 927) and the 62 (literally 'Announced order', meaning imperial edicts) recorded in the "Shoku Nihongi" (797).


title: Old Japanese

text: A limited number of Japanese words, mostly personal names and place names, are recorded phonetically in ancient Chinese texts, such as the ""Wei Zhi"" portion of the "Records of the Three Kingdoms" (3rd century AD), but the transcriptions by Chinese scholars are unreliable.


title: Old Japanese

text: The oldest surviving native inscriptions, dating from the 5th or early 6th centuries, include those on the Suda Hachiman Shrine Mirror, the Inariyama Sword, and the Eta Funayama Sword.


title: Old Japanese

text: Those inscriptions are written in Classical Chinese but contain several Japanese names that were transcribed phonetically using Chinese characters.


title: Old Japanese

text: The tablets bear short texts, often in Old Japanese of a more colloquial style than the polished poems and liturgies of the primary corpus.


title: Old Japanese

text: Artifacts inscribed with Chinese characters dated as early as the 1st century AD have been found in Japan, but detailed knowledge of the script seems not to have reached the islands until the early 5th century.


title: Old Japanese

text: According to the "Kojiki" and "Nihon Shoki", the script was brought by scholars from Baekje (southwestern Korea).


title: Old Japanese

text: Later "hybrid" texts show the influence of Japanese grammar, such as the word order (for example, the verb being placed after the object).


title: Old Japanese

text: Chinese and Koreans had long used Chinese characters to write non-Chinese terms and proper names phonetically by selecting characters for Chinese words that sounded similar to each syllable.


title: Old Japanese

text: Koreans also used the characters phonetically to write Korean particles and inflections that were added to Chinese texts to allow them to be read as Korean (Idu script).


title: Old Japanese

text: In Japan, the practice was developed into , a complete script for the language that used Chinese characters phonetically, which was the ancestor of modern kana syllabaries.


title: Old Japanese

text: This method of writing Japanese syllables by using characters for their Chinese sounds () was supplemented with indirect methods in the complex mixed script of the "Man'yōshū" (c. 759).


title: Old Japanese

text: In , each Old Japanese syllable was represented by a Chinese character. Although any of several characters could be used for a given syllable, a careful analysis reveals that 88 syllables were distinguished in early Old Japanese, typified by the "Kojiki" songs:


title: Old Japanese

text: As in later forms of Japanese, the system has gaps where "yi" and "wu" might be expected. Shinkichi Hashimoto discovered in 1917 that many syllables that have a modern "i", "e" or "o" occurred in two forms, termed types and .


title: Old Japanese

text: These are denoted by subscripts 1 and 2 respectively in the above table. The syllables "mo" and "mo" are not distinguished in the slightly-later "Nihon Shoki" and "Man'yōshū", reducing the syllable count to 87.


title: Old Japanese

text: Conversely, syllables consisting of a single vowel were restricted to word-initial position, with a few exceptions such as 'oar', 'to lie down', 'to regret' (with conclusive ), 'to age' and , the adnominal form of the verb 'to plant'. Alexander Vovin argues that the non-initial syllables "i" and "u" in these cases should be read as Old Japanese syllables "yi" and "wu".


title: Old Japanese

text: One difficulty is that the Middle Chinese pronunciations of the characters used are also disputed, and since the reconstruction of their phonetic values is partly based on later Sino-Japanese pronunciations, there is a danger of circular reasoning.


title: Old Japanese

text: Additional evidence has been drawn from phonological typology, subsequent developments in the Japanese pronunciation, and the comparative study of the Ryukyuan languages.


title: Old Japanese

text: Prenasalization was still present in the late 17th century (according to the Korean textbook "Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ") and is found in some Modern Japanese and Ryukyuan dialects, but it has disappeared in Modern Japanese except for the intervocalic nasal stop allophone of .


title: Old Japanese

text: Comparative evidence from Ryukyuan languages suggests that Old Japanese "p" continued an earlier voiceless bilabial stop *p.


title: Old Japanese

text: There is general agreement that word-initial "p" had become a voiceless bilabial fricative by Early Middle Japanese, as suggested by its transcription as "f" in later Portuguese works and as "ph" or "hw" in the Korean textbook "Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ". In Modern Standard Japanese, it is romanized as "h" and has different allophones before various vowels. In medial position, it became in Early Middle Japanese but has disappeared except before "a".


title: Old Japanese

text: Many scholars argue that "p" had already lenited to by the Old Japanese period, but Miyake argues that it was still a stop.


title: Old Japanese

text: The Chinese characters chosen to write syllables with the Old Japanese vowel "a" suggest that it was an open unrounded vowel .


title: Old Japanese

text: Several hypotheses have been advanced to explain the A/B distinctions made in . The issue is hotly debated, and there is no consensus. The traditional view, first advanced by Kyōsuke Kindaichi in 1938, is that there were eight pure vowels, with the type B vowels being more central than their type A counterparts. Others, beginning in the 1930s but more commonly since the work of Roland Lange in 1968, have attributed the type A/B distinction to medial or final glides and . The diphthong proposals are often connected to hypotheses about pre-Old Japanese, but all exhibit an uneven distribution of glides.


title: Old Japanese

text: If that was true, a distinction was made between "Co" and "Co" for all consonants C except for "w". Some take that as evidence that "Co" may have represented "Cwo".


title: Old Japanese

text: Although modern Japanese dialects have pitch accent systems, they were usually not shown in . However, in one part of the "Nihon Shoki", the Chinese characters appeared to have been chosen to represent a pitch pattern similar to that recorded in the "Ruiju Myōgishō", a dictionary that was compiled in the late 11th century. In that section, a low pitch syllable was represented by a character with the Middle Chinese level tone, and a high pitch was represented by a character with one of the other three Middle Chinese tones.


title: Old Japanese

text: Old Japanese words consisted of one or more open syllables of the form (C)V, subject to additional restrictions:


title: Old Japanese

text: In 1934, Arisaka Hideyo proposed a set of phonological restrictions permitted in a single morpheme. Arisaka's Law states that "-o" was generally not found in the same morpheme as "-a", "-o" or "-u".


title: Old Japanese

text: Some scholars have interpreted that as a vestige of earlier vowel harmony, but it is very different from patterns that are observed in, for example, the Turkic languages.


title: Old Japanese

text: Two adjacent vowels fused to form a new vowel when a consonant was lost within a morpheme, or a compound was lexicalized as a single morpheme.


title: Old Japanese

text: Adjacent vowels belonging to different morphemes, or pairs of vowels for which none of the above fusions applied, were reduced by deleting one or other of the vowels.


title: Old Japanese

text: The exception to this rule occurred when the first of the adjacent vowels was the sole vowel of a monosyllabic morpheme (usually a clitic), in which case the other vowel was deleted:


title: Old Japanese

text: Internal reconstruction suggests that the stage preceding Old-Japanese had fewer consonants and vowels.


title: Old Japanese

text: Internal reconstruction suggests that the Old Japanese voiced obstruents, which always occurred in medial position, arose from the weakening of earlier nasal syllables before voiceless obstruents:


title: Old Japanese

text: In some cases, there is no evidence for a preceding vowel, which leads some scholars to posit final nasals at the earlier stage.


title: Old Japanese

text: Some linguists suggest that Old Japanese "w" and "y" derive, respectively, from *b and *d at some point before the oldest inscriptions in the 6th century.


title: Old Japanese

text: Southern Ryukyuan varieties such as Miyako, Yaeyama and Yonaguni have corresponding to Old Japanese "w", but only Yonaguni (at the far end of the chain) has where Old Japanese has "y":


title: Old Japanese

text: However, many linguists, especially in Japan, argue that the Southern Ryukyuan voiced stops are local innovations, adducing a variety of reasons.


title: Old Japanese

text: Some supporters of *b and *d also add *z and *g, which both disappeared in Old Japanese, for reasons of symmetry.


title: Old Japanese

text: As seen in , many occurrences of the rare vowels "i", "e", "e" and "o" arise from fusion of more common vowels.


title: Old Japanese

text: Similarly, many nouns having independent forms ending in "-i" or "-e" also have bound forms ending in a different vowel, which are believed to be older.


title: Old Japanese

text: The widely accepted analysis of this situation is that the most common Old Japanese vowels "a", "u", "i" and "o" reflect earlier *a, *u, *i and *ə respectively, and the other vowels reflect fusions of these vowels:


title: Old Japanese

text: Some authors believe that they belong to an earlier layer than "i" < *əi, but others reconstruct two central vowels *ə and *ɨ, which merged everywhere except before *i.


title: Old Japanese

text: Other authors attribute the variation to different reflexes in different dialects and note that *əi yields "e" in Ryukyuan languages.


title: Old Japanese

text: Some instances of word-final "e" and "o" are difficult to analyse as fusions, and some authors postulate *e and *o to account for such cases.


title: Old Japanese

text: A few alternations, as well as comparisons with Eastern Old Japanese and Ryukyuan languages, suggest that *e and *o also occurred in non-word-final positions at an earlier stage but were raised in such positions to "i" and "u", respectively, in central Old Japanese.


title: Old Japanese

text: As in later forms of Japanese, Old Japanese word order was predominantly subject–object–verb, with adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they modify and auxiliary verbs and particles consistently appended to the main verb.


title: Old Japanese

text: Many Old Japanese pronouns had both a short form and a longer form with attached of uncertain etymology.


title: Old Japanese

text: With genitive particles or in nominal compounds, the short form was used, but in other situations, either form was possible.


title: Old Japanese

text: Personal pronouns were distinguished by taking the genitive marker , in contrast to the marker used with demonstratives and nouns.


title: Old Japanese

text: Demonstratives often distinguished proximal (to the speaker) and non-proximal forms marked with and respectively.


title: Old Japanese

text: In Early Middle Japanese, the non-proximal forms were reinterpreted as hearer-based (medial), and the speaker-based forms were divided into proximal forms and distal / forms, yielding the three-way distinction that is still found in Modern Japanese.


title: Old Japanese

text: In later texts, such as the "Man'yōshū", numerals were sometimes written using Chinese logographs, which give no indication of pronunciation.


title: Old Japanese

text: In Classical Japanese, the other ordinal numerals had the same form as cardinals, and this may also have been the case for Old Japanese, though there are no textual occurrences to settle the question.


title: Old Japanese

text: Other categories, such as voice, tense, aspect and mood, were expressed by using optional suffixed auxiliaries, which were also inflected.


title: Old Japanese

text: In traditional Japanese grammar, they are represented by six forms (, ) from which all the others may be derived in a similar fashion to the principal parts used for Latin and other languages:


title: Old Japanese

text: This system has been criticized because the six forms are not equivalent, with one being solely a combinatory stem, three solely word forms, and two being both.


title: Old Japanese

text: However, five of the forms are basic inflected verb forms, and the system also describes almost all extended forms consistently.


title: Old Japanese

text: Old Japanese verbs are classified into eight conjugation classes, each being characterized by different patterns of inflected forms.


title: Old Japanese

text: The distinctions between "i" and "i" and between "e" and "e" were eliminated after "s", "z", "t", "d", "n", "y", "r" and "w".


title: Old Japanese

text: Early Middle Japanese also had a (lower monograde or "e"-monograde) category, consisting of a single verb 'kick', which reflected the Old Japanese lower bigrade verb .


title: Old Japanese

text: Some bigrade bases also appear to reflect pre-Old-Japanese adjectives with vowel stems combined with an inchoative *-i suffix:


title: Old Japanese

text: Old Japanese had a rich system of auxiliary elements that could be suffixed to verb stems and were themselves inflected, usually following the regular consonant-stem or vowel-stem paradigms, but never including the full range of stems found with full verbs.


title: Old Japanese

text: Old Japanese adjectives were originally nominals and, unlike in later periods, could be used uninflected to modify following nouns.


title: Old Japanese

text: The second class had stems ending in , which differed only in the conclusive form, whose suffix was dropped by haplology.


title: Old Japanese

text: Towards the end of the Old Japanese period, a more expressive conjugation emerged by adding the verb 'be' to the infinitive, with the sequence reducing to :


title: Old Japanese

text: Many adjectival nouns of Early Middle Japanese were based on Old Japanese adjectives that were formed with suffixes , or .


title: Old Japanese

text: Although most Old Japanese writing represents the language of the Nara court in central Japan, some sources come from eastern Japan:


title: Old Japanese

text: They record Eastern Old Japanese dialects, with several differences from central Old Japanese (also known as Western Old Japanese):


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Vitali Klitschko (born 19 July 1971) and Wladimir Klitschko (born 25 March 1976), known as the Klitschko Brothers, are Ukrainian former professional boxers. During their peak years between 2004 and 2015, they were considered the dominant world heavyweight champions of their era, and among the most successful champions in boxing history. In 2011, they entered the Guinness World Records book as the pair of brothers with most world heavyweight title fight wins (30 at the time; 40 as of 2020). In the years following the retirement of undisputed heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis in 2004, the Klitschko brothers would eventually accumulate all four major world heavyweight titles. Known for their exceptionally large physiques, they each developed a style that utilized their athleticism and arm reach to break down opponents.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: In 2013, Vitali retired from boxing, relinquishing the WBC world title, and became a politician in his native Ukraine. Wladimir continued to successfully defend the WBA (Super), IBF, WBO, IBO, and "The Ring" magazine titles until he was defeated by Tyson Fury in 2015.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Both brothers made their professional debuts on November 16, 1996 in Hamburg. Since then, both have been world heavyweight boxing champions. They promised their mother that they would never fight each other.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: As an amateur, Wladimir Klitschko represented Ukraine at the 1996 Olympics, winning a gold medal in the super-heavyweight division. In 1996, when still an amateur, Vitali Klitschko tested positive for a banned substance and was removed from the Ukrainian boxing team.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: In June 1999, Vitali Klitschko won the WBO Heavyweight title from Herbie Hide via second-round knockout. He successfully defended the title twice before losing it to Chris Byrd. Six months later, younger brother Wladimir dethroned Byrd via lopsided points decision. He registered five successful title defenses, all by TKO until suffering an upset TKO loss to Corrie Sanders in March 2003.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Vitali Klitschko lost his fight with Lennox Lewis in his attempt to win the WBC, IBO, The Ring and lineal heavyweight championships.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Vitali faced South African Corrie Sanders on 24 April 2004 for the WBC heavyweight championship and The Ring belts that had been vacated by Lewis. Vitali won by 8th round stoppage, he defended his titles just once, stopping Danny Williams in the 8th round before retiring in late 2005 due to injuries. Wladimir bounced back from a stoppage loss in a prior vacant title attempt, to dethrone Byrd for a second time for his IBF title in April 2006, this time by stoppage in the 7th round.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: After a series of injuries, Vitali had a career break of almost four years. In his comeback fight in Berlin on October 11, 2008 he defeated Samuel Peter to regain the title of WBC world heavyweight champion. At that time Wladimir was already world heavyweight champion with the WBO, IBF and IBO. That was the first time in history with two brothers world champions at the same time. On July 2, 2011, Wladimir won the WBA Title, which means that the Klitschko brothers held all of the World Heavyweight Titles simultaneously for 2 years, 5 months & 13 days. Vitali retained the WBC Heavyweight Championship until 15 December 2013, relinquishing his belt in pursuit of his political aspirations in his native Ukraine.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: The Klitschko brothers jointly run the professional boxing promotion companies ""K2 Promotions"" and ""K2 East Promotions"", as well as the ""Klitschko Brothers Fund"", a charity organization. They appear together on German TV shows and commercials, have a website shared between them, and support each other's training and fights.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: After Vitali's retirement, Wladimir continued to reign as champion & successfully defend all remaining title belts except for the WBC belt. He eventually lost all the belts by unanimous decision to Tyson Fury. The brothers have a combined professional boxing record of 109 wins (94 KO's) and 7 defeats, including 46 world title fights.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Both Klitschko brothers are considered the best heavyweight boxers of their era. Having remained undefeated for a large majority of their careers and refusing to fight each other, both brothers remained largely unchallenged throughout their careers. Notably, both brothers were particularly well known for using their large size to nullify other heavyweights, particularly Wladimir, who became notorious for his use of the jab. In 2011, Wladimir and Vitali entered the Guinness World Records book as the pair of brothers with most world heavyweight title fight wins (30 at the time; 40 as of 2020).


title: Klitschko brothers

text: In Ukraine, boxing fights involving one of the Klitschko brothers regularly attracted between 10–20 million viewers; some of their fights generated even bigger viewership numbers. Vitali and Wladimir have been named multiple times among the 100 most influential people in Ukraine by Korrespondent: they were ranked 60th and 95th respectively in 2006; 44th and 88th in 2010; 41st and 43rd in 2011; 16th and 51st in 2012; 10th and 45th in 2013. Vitali was also ranked 23rd in 2017 and 28th in 2019. Forbes named Wladimir the most popular celebrity in Ukraine in 2015, placing him ahead of a singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk and Kvartal 95 Studio, and ranked him second and third in 2012 and 2013 respectively (the ranking wasn't conducted in 2014); Vitali was ranked fifth in 2012. In 2008, the Klitschko brothers were ranked number 15 in Inter's list of the "100 Greatest Ukrainians" following a nation-wide poll that saw around 2.5 million people casting their votes.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: The Klitschkos were also considered big stars in Germany. According to DW, a research conducted no later than 2011 showed that nearly 99% of people in Germany recognized the Klitschko brothers; a similar research carried out by TNS for the Horizont Sport Business in 2003 showed that Wladimir Klitschko had been recognized by 91.7% of Germans while Vitali had been recognized by 90.9% of respondents, making them the fourth and sixth most recognized athlete in Germany at the time respectively. The CPI Index conducted by the agency Celebrity Performance in 2012 had the Klitschkos ranked second on the list of the most marketable celebrities in Germany, while in 2014, based on a survey of 1151 respondents that was conducted by the same agency, the Klitschko brothers were ranked 6th among the most significant personalities in the country. Eighteen of their fights generated above 10 million average viewers, and Wladimir's world heavyweight title defense against Eddie Chambers in March 2010 drew bigger viewership numbers on RTL than the return of the Formula One legend voted the greatest German athlete of the 20th century Michael Schumacher.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Known for charity work and philanthropy, the Klitschkos are two of only 15 living current or former athletes that have been named UNESCO Champions for Sport.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Having never been knocked down, Vitali Klitschko is widely regarded as the tougher fighter of the two. His 87% knockout percentage is one of the best knockout-to-fight ratios of any champion in heavyweight boxing history. Vitali was also known for being unusually dominant in his fights, having almost never lost a round in his professional career as a boxer.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Throughout his career, Vitali has defeated 15 boxers for the world heavyweight title, the fifth-most in history (tied with Lennox Lewis), including two – Corrie Sanders and Danny Williams – for "The Ring" world heavyweight championship. Klitschko is one of nine boxers to defeat at least ten different fighters for the world heavyweight title. He is the only heavyweight boxer to have reigned as world champion in three different decades. Klitschko and George Foreman are the only heavyweight boxers in history to defend a world title after turning 40.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: As of August 2022, BoxRec ranks Vitali as the 16th greatest heavyweight fighter of all time. According to BoxRec, Vitali has defeated 7 previously undefeated fighters with a combined record 135–0–3 (95 KOs) – these 7 included Alben Belinski (professional record 5–0, 5 KOs coming into the fight), Ed Mahone (21–0–2, 21 KOs), Timo Hoffmann (22–0, 13 KOs), Chris Arreola (27–0, 24 KOs), Kevin Johnson (22–0–1, 9 KOs), Odlanier Solis (17–0, 12 KOs) and Manuel Charr (21–0, 11 KOs).


title: Klitschko brothers

text: During his time as WBC champion, Vitali Klitschko was described as being the best of his time, and George Foreman stated that he has the best straight left in the division.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: At the end of 2004, Vitali was honoured with the Hero of Ukraine Order of State, the highest Ukrainian honour, for his achievements and contributions to the development of Ukrainian sports. In 2010, Vitali was awarded the German Cross of the Order of Merit, the highest German honour, for his social and political engagement. In 2013, Klitschko was awarded the Georgian Presidential Order of Excellence. In 2018, Vitali was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. He was elected in his first year of eligibility.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: As heavyweight champion, Wladimir was unbeaten for over a decade. Wladimir Klitschko is considered to be one of the greatest heavyweight champions of all time, and amongst the hardest punching knockout artists in history. He has been heavily praised for his fundamental approach to boxing, during which he nullifies opponents with his jab, before knocking opponents out with a straight right. While not as durable as Vitali, his knowledge of the fundamentals and athleticism gave him considerable advantage over other heavyweights.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: During Wladimir's reign as world heavyweight champion, his fights regularly drew between 300–500 million viewers worldwide. Wladimir has been named multiple times among the 100 highest paid athletes in the world by Forbes: he was ranked 24th in 2012 (estimated earnings $28 million between June 2011 and June 2012), 41st in 2013 ($24 million), 25th in 2014 ($28 million), 63rd in 2015 ($22.5 million) and 98th in 2017 ($21.5 million). He was unranked by Forbes in 2016, despite the fact that he reportedly earned $22.5 million for the fight against Tyson Fury in November 2015 alone (100th-ranked Buster Posey earned $20.8 million; 85th-ranked Conor McGregor earned $22 million). Wladimir Klitschko's total professional career earnings' estimations vary between €150 million (cca $200 million) and $250 million.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Throughout his career, Wladimir has defeated 23 boxers for the world heavyweight championship, the most in boxing history. He holds several historical records, including the longest combined world championship reign in heavyweight history at 4,382 days (12 years); the most beaten opponents and wins in world heavyweight title bouts since the international expansion of boxing governing bodies, at 23 and 25 respectively; the most wins in unified title bouts and the longest unified championship reign in professional boxing history at 15 title bouts and 14 consecutive defenses respectively; and has the second most total successful title defenses of any heavyweight boxer with 23 (including his first reign as WBO champion), behind Joe Louis (25) and ahead of Larry Holmes (20) and Muhammad Ali (19). Klitschko fought in 29 world heavyweight title fights, more than any other boxer in history.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: As of August 2022, BoxRec ranks Wladimir as the seventh greatest heavyweight boxer of all time. According to BoxRec, Wladimir has also defeated 12 previously undefeated fighters with a combined record 267–0–5 (174 KOs) – these 12 included Najee Shaheed (professional record 16–0–1, 8 KOs coming into the fight), Zoran Vujicic (14–0, 6 KOs), Eliseo Castillo (18–0–1, 14 KOs), Samuel Peter (24–0, 21 KOs), Calvin Brock (29–0, 22 KOs), Sultan Ibragimov (22–0–1, 17 KOs), Ruslan Chagaev (25–0–1, 17 KOs), Mariusz Wach (27–0, 15 KOs), Francesco Pianeta (28–0–1, 15 KOs), Alexander Povetkin (26–0, 18 KOs), Kubrat Pulev (20–0, 11 KOs) and Bryant Jennings (19–0, 10 KOs). Wladimir has beaten 9 current or former world champions throughout his career. These included heavyweight champions Chris Byrd (twice), Ray Mercer, Francois Botha, Lamon Brewster, Samuel Peter (twice), Sultan Ibragimov, Hasim Rahman, Ruslan Chagaev and two-weight world champion David Haye, as well as unified cruiserweight champion Jean-Marc Mormeck.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: In 2017, Wladimir was honoured with the Order of Liberty, the highest Ukrainian honour that can be awarded to a person of any nationality, for his achievements in sports and contribution to the economical, scientific and cultural development of Ukraine. In 2021, Klitschko was inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Just like his brother, Wladimir was elected in his first year of eligibility, having been chosen over Miguel Cotto and James Toney by a panel of around 200 international boxing historians.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: A criticism of the Klitschkos is that their dominant championship reign was the result of a heavyweight landscape devoid of world class competition. Previous heavyweight eras had multiple boxers considered world class fighters competing, such as Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman during the 1970s, and Mike Tyson, Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield during the 1990s. According to some observers, this was not the case for the Klitschkos, who were able to dominate other heavyweights with relative ease. The list of fighters the Klitschkos have defeated, however, includes unified world cruiserweight champion David Haye, long-reigning WBC cruiserweight champion Juan Carlos Gomez, long-time top ranked contender Alexander Povetkin and two-weight world champion Tomasz Adamek. Between both Vitali and Wladimir, a total of 14 current or former world champions have been beaten – these 14 included Herbie Hide, Chris Byrd (twice), Ray Mercer, Lamon Brewster, Samuel Peter (three times), Sultan Ibragimov, Hasim Rahman, Ruslan Chagaev, Corrie Sanders, Shannon Briggs, two-weight world champions David Haye and Tomasz Adamek and cruiserweight champions Jean-Marc Mormeck and Juan Carlos Gomez.


title: Klitschko brothers

text: Wladimir Klitschko's style receives strong criticism from the boxing community, commonly being described as "boring" or "robotic". While initially an exciting fighter, a series of losses led him to hire legendary boxing trainer Emmanuel Steward to cultivate his defensive abilities. At 6′ 6″, and one of the largest heavyweights in the division, Wladimir typically relies on an excellent jab to keep opponents at arms reach, and then clinching opponents once they get too close. This was meant to fatigue opponents before he would knock them out in the later rounds or win on scorecards.


title: Spic

text: Spic (also spelled spick) is an ethnic slur used in the United States for people from Latin American and Italian-speaking countries and states.


title: Spic

text: Some sources from the United States believe that the word "spic" is a play on a Spanish-accented pronunciation of the English word "speak". The "Oxford English Dictionary" takes "spic" to be a contraction of the earlier form "spiggoty". The oldest known use of "spiggoty" is in 1910 by Wilbur Lawton in "Boy Aviators in Nicaragua, or, In League with the Insurgents". Stuart Berg Flexner, in "I Hear America Talking" (1976), favored the explanation that it derives from "no spik Ingles" (or "no spika de Ingles").


title: Spic

text: However, in an earlier publication, the 1960 "Dictionary of American Slang", written by Dr. Harold Wentworth, with Flexner as second author, "spic" is first identified as a noun for an Italian or "American of Italian ancestry", along with the words "'spic", "spig", and "spiggoty", and confirms that it is shortened from the word "spaghetti". The authors refer to the word's usage in James M. Cain's "Mildred Pierce", referring to a "wop or spig", and note that this term was never preferred over "wop", and has been rarely used since 1915. However, the etymology remains.


title: Jing Lusi

text: Jing Lusi (Chinese: 陆思敬; born 16 May 1985) is a British actress. She is best known for her roles in "Stan Lee's Lucky Man", the 2018 hit film ""Crazy Rich Asians"" and BAFTA nominated series ""Gangs of London"". On stage, Lusi was part of the original cast of the European premiere of Amy Herzog's play "4000 Miles". She has presented for the BBC, as well as being the focus, for the documentaries "My Chinese New Year" (2015) and "Chinese New Year: The Biggest Celebration on Earth" (2016).


title: Jing Lusi

text: Lusi was born on 16 May 1985 in Pudong, Shanghai, and moved with her parents to the United Kingdom at the age of five. Her family settled in Southampton, her father having been granted a scholarship to study a master's degree at the university. She studied at Peter Symonds College, Winchester, then read law at University College London.


title: Jing Lusi

text: Lusi's first television role was in the BBC's BAFTA award-winning medical drama series "Holby City". She made her debut in 2012, playing Tara Lo. In 2013, Lusi left the cast when her character died during neurosurgery, her final episode airing on 16 April 2013. She has starred in TV shows such as "Stan Lee's Lucky Man" as the villainous Lily-Anne Lau alongside James Nesbitt, played detectives in "Scott & Bailey" and "Gangs of London", and has made guest appearances in shows like Matthew Weiner's anthology series "The Romanoffs".


title: Jing Lusi

text: In films, Lusi has starred in the action thriller "Survivor" alongside Milla Jovovich, Pierce Brosnan, Dylan McDermott and Robert Forster, Warner Bros box office hit ""Crazy Rich Asians"" and "" with Sam Heughan, Ruby Rose and Tom Hopper, based on the book "Red Notice" by Andy McNab.


title: Jing Lusi

text: On stage, Lusi performed as Amanda in the Pulitzer Prize shortlisted play "4000 Miles" at the Theatre Royal, Bath and The Print Room in London in 2013, for which she received critical acclaim. The Independent described her performance as, ""cruelly well observed, and very funny... Jing Lusi nails the narcissism and the ridiculous, relentless self-promotion of the Facebook age"".


title: Jing Lusi

text: Lusi performed at Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2015 as part of a collective of comedians in "Immigrant Diaries"; a comedy story telling show aimed to 'show a different side' to the heaviness of the topic during the General Election of the same year.


title: Love Shack

text: "Love Shack" is a song by American new wave band the B-52's from their fifth studio album, "Cosmic Thing" (1989). It was released on June 20, 1989, and was produced by Don Was. The song was a comeback for the band following their decline in popularity in the mid-1980s and the death of guitarist Ricky Wilson in 1985.


title: Love Shack

text: "Love Shack" is considered the band's signature song and has been a concert staple since its release. Commercially, the single topped the charts in Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand and reached number two on the UK Singles Chart, number three on the US "Billboard" Hot 100 (becoming their first top-40 hit), and number five on the Canadian "RPM" Top Singles chart. "Rolling Stone" named "Love Shack" the best single of 1989 and ranked it 246th on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The song was also named one of the 365 Songs of the Century in 2001.


title: Love Shack

text: The inspiration for the song was "a cabin around Athens, Georgia," with a tin roof, where the band conceived "Rock Lobster", a single from their debut album. The cabin was said to have been located off the Atlanta Highway near Athens. B-52's singer Kate Pierson lived in the cabin in the 1970s, and it burned down in December 2004. Cindy Wilson's line "tin roof rusted" was originally an outtake from a jamming session, where Wilson continued her line while the tape had stopped. While there has been speculation about the meaning of the line, according to Kate Pierson, it literally means a rusted tin roof.


title: Love Shack

text: Matthew Hocter from Albumism noted the band's "own unique brand of upbeat, lyrically positive and infectious dance grooves", like on "Love Shack". Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic described it as "an irresistible dance number with delightfully silly lyrics and hooks as big as a whale that unbelievably gave the group a long-awaited Top Ten hit." The Daily Vault's Denise Henderson commented, "The celebration of life in dance and music is demonstrated by the repetitive chorus 'Everybody's movin/everybody's groovin baby!' Well, when in doubt, dancing and drinking and having a little fun always worked for me!" Pan-European magazine "Music & Media" said it is the best track from the disappointing "Cosmic Thing". "Good clean fun from some of the US' most productive eccentrics." David Giles from "Music Week" wrote, "The B-52's deserve a hit after their fine return to form last summer with the "Cosmic Thing" LP, but I'd be surprised if this is the track to do it." He added, "Like Party Out of Bounds, it tries to conjure up a wild, chaotic celebration, but unlike that particular track it is neither inventive nor melodic enough." A reviewer from "People" magazine noted "the wild abandon" of the song.


title: Love Shack

text: The accompanying music video for "Love Shack" was directed by American film director, music video director and television director Adam Bernstein and shot at the home and studio of ceramic artists Philip Maberry and Scott Walker in Highland, New York. The video features a cameo from a pre-fame RuPaul in his first mainstream appearance. The video won the award for Best Group Video at the 1990 MTV Video Music Awards.


title: Love Shack

text: The single was the band's biggest hit song as well as their first million-copy seller. It was the band's first song to reach the top 40 on the US "Billboard" Hot 100, peaking at number three in November 1989. It also reached number five in Canada, number two in the United Kingdom, and number one in Australia (eight weeks), Ireland (one week) and New Zealand (four weeks), as well as on the "Billboard" Modern Rock Tracks chart (four weeks).


title: Love Shack

text: The single release contained different tracks in different countries of release. Some countries, including the United States, had singles backed with "Channel Z", while other releases included live versions of "Planet Claire" and "Rock Lobster" as the B-side. In 1999, the single was released again with a number of remixes, including one by DJ Tonka. Although the re-release did not chart in the United States, it did enter the UK Singles Chart.


title: Buda Castle

text: Buda Castle (, ) is the historical castle and palace complex of the Hungarian Kings in Budapest. It was first completed in 1265, although the massive Baroque palace today occupying most of the site was built between 1749 and 1769. The complex in the past was referred to as either the Royal Palace () or the Royal Castle (, ). The castle now houses the Hungarian National Gallery and the Hungarian National Museum.


title: Buda Castle

text: Buda Castle sits on the southern tip of Castle Hill, surrounded by the touristic area known as Várnegyed (Castle Quarter), which is famous for its Medieval, Baroque, and Neoclassical houses, churches, public buildings, and monuments. The hill is linked to and the Széchenyi Chain Bridge by the Castle Hill Funicular. The castle is a part of the Budapest World Heritage Site, so declared in 1987. The original Royal Palace was ruined during World War II; it was rebuilt in a simplified Stalinist Baroque style during the Kádár era.


title: Buda Castle

text: The first royal residence on the Castle Hill was built by King Béla IV of Hungary between 1247 and 1265. It is uncertain whether it was situated on the southern tip of the hill or on the northern elevation, near the Kammerhof.


title: Buda Castle

text: The oldest part of the present-day palace was built in the 14th century by Stephen, Duke of Slavonia, who was the younger brother of King Louis I of Hungary. Only the foundations remain of the castle keep, which was known as ""' (Hungarian: "István-torony"). The Gothic palace of King Louis I was arranged around a narrow courtyard next to the keep.


title: Buda Castle

text: King Sigismund significantly enlarged the palace and strengthened its fortifications. Sigismund, as a Holy Roman Emperor, needed a magnificent royal residence to express his prominence among the rulers of Europe. He chose Buda Castle as his main residence, and during his long reign it became probably the largest Gothic palace of the late Middle Ages. Buda was an important artistic centre of the International Gothic style.


title: Buda Castle

text: Construction began in the 1410s and was largely finished in the 1420s, although some minor works continued until the death of the king in 1437. The palace was first mentioned in 1437, under the name ""fricz palotha"".


title: Buda Castle

text: The most important part of Sigismund's palace was the northern wing, known as the Fresh Palace (Hun: "Friss-palota"). On the top floor was a large hall called the Roman Hall () with a carved wooden ceiling. Great windows and balconies faced toward the city of Buda. The façade of the palace was decorated with statues, a and coat-of-arms. In front stood the bronze equestrian statue of Sigismund, later repaired by King Matthias Corvinus.


title: Buda Castle

text: The southern part of the royal residency was surrounded with narrow "zwingers". Two parallel walls, the so-called "cortina walls", run down from the palace to the River Danube across the steep hillside. The most imposing structure, the Broken Tower (Hun: "Csonka-torony"), on the western side of the "cour d'honneur", remained unfinished. The basement of the tower was used as a dungeon; the top floors were probably the treasury of the royal jewels.


title: Buda Castle

text: The last phase of large-scale building activity took place under King Matthias Corvinus. During the first decades of his reign the king finished the work on the Gothic palace. The Royal Chapel, with the surviving Lower Church, was likely built at that time.


title: Buda Castle

text: After the marriage of Matthias and Beatrice of Naples in 1476, Italian humanists, artists and craftsmen arrived at Buda. The Hungarian capital became the first centre of Renaissance north of the Alps. The king rebuilt the palace in an early Renaissance style. The "cour d'honneur" was modernised and an Italian "loggia" was added. Inside the palace were two rooms with golden ceilings: the Bibliotheca Corviniana and a passage with the frescoes of the twelve signs of the Zodiac. The façade of the palace was decorated with statues of John Hunyadi, László Hunyadi and King Matthias. In the middle of the court there was a fountain with a statue of Pallas Athene.


title: Buda Castle

text: Only fragments remain of this Renaissance palace: some red marble balustrades, lintels and decorative glazed tiles from stoves and floors.


title: Buda Castle

text: In the last years of his reign Matthias Corvinus started construction of a new Renaissance palace on the eastern side of the Sigismund Courtyard, next to the Fresh Palace. The Matthias Palace remained unfinished because of the king's early death. The palace had a monumental red marble stairway in front of the façade. Matthias Corvinus was usually identified with Hercules by the humanists of his court; the bronze gates were decorated with panels depicting the deeds of Hercules, and a great bronze statue of the Greek hero welcomed the guests in the forecourt of the palace complex, where jousts were held.


title: Buda Castle

text: The walled gardens of the palace were laid out on the western slopes of the Castle Hill. In the middle of the enclosure, a Renaissance villa was built by Matthias. Only one column survives of this so-called "Aula Marmorea".


title: Buda Castle

text: After the death of Matthias Corvinus, his successor, King Vladislaus II, carried on the works of the Matthias Palace, especially after his marriage with Anna of Foix-Candale in 1502.


title: Buda Castle

text: Under the reign of King John Zápolya (the last national ruler of Hungary) the palace was repaired. On the southern tip of the Castle Hill, the Great Rondella was built by Italian military engineers. The circular bastion is one of the main surviving structure of the old palace.


title: Buda Castle

text: After the Battle of Mohács, the medieval Kingdom of Hungary collapsed. The Ottoman Turks occupied the evacuated town on 11 September 1526. Although Buda was sacked and burned, the Royal Palace was not damaged. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent carried away all the bronze statues (the Hunyadis, Pallas Athene and Hercules) with him to Constantinople. The statues were destroyed there in a rebellion a few years later. The Sultan also took many volumes from the Corvina library.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1529 the Ottoman army besieged and occupied Buda again, and the palace was badly damaged. On 29 August 1541 Buda was occupied again by the Ottomans, without any resistance. Buda became part of Ottoman Empire and the seat of the Eyalet of Budin. The original German and Hungarian population left the city, immigrants from the Ottoman Empire and the Balkan peninsula came to their place.


title: Buda Castle

text: Although Turkish travel writers wrote enthusiastically about the beauty of the palace of the Hungarian kings, the new Ottoman government let the palace decay. It was partially used as barracks a storage place and stables, and otherwise it stood empty.


title: Buda Castle

text: The palace was called "Iç Kala" ("Inner Castle") and "Hisar Peçe" ("Citadel") by the Turks. The name of the "cour d'honneur" was ""Seray meydani"". The favourite nickname of the complex was "Palace of the Golden Apples".


title: Buda Castle

text: The economic decline of Buda the capital city during the Ottoman conquest characterised by the stagnation of population, the population of Buda was not larger in 1686, than the population of the city two centuries earlier in the 15th century. The Ottomans allowed the Hungarian royal palace to fall into ruins. The amortised palace was later transformed into a gunpowder storage and magazine by the Ottomans, which caused its detonation during the siege in 1686. The original Christian Hungarian population didn't feel secure during the Ottoman conquest, their numbers significantly shrank in the next decades, due to their fleeing to the Habsburg ruled Royal Hungary. The proportion of the population who were of Jews and Gypsy families increased during the Ottoman rule in Buda.


title: Buda Castle

text: In the era between 1541 and 1686, the Habsburgs tried to re-capture Buda several times. Unsuccessful sieges in 1542, 1598, 1603 and 1684 caused serious damage. The Ottoman authorities repaired only the fortifications. According to 17th-century sources, many buildings of the former Royal Palace were roofless and their vaults collapsed. Nonetheless the medieval palace mostly survived until the great siege of 1686.


title: Buda Castle

text: The medieval palace was destroyed in the great siege of 1686 when Buda was captured by allied Christian forces.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1686, two years after the unsuccessful siege of Buda, a renewed Western European Christian campaign was started to take the city. This time the Holy League's army was much larger, consisting of 65,000–100,000 men, including German, Hungarian, Croat, Dutch, English, Spanish, Czech, Italian, French, Burgundian, Danish and Swedish soldiers and other Europeans as volunteers, artillerymen and officers. The Turkish defenders consisted of 7,000 men.


title: Buda Castle

text: In a heavy artillery bombardment, many buildings burned and collapsed. The Stephen's Tower, used as a gunpowder store by the Ottomans, exploded when hit by a single cannon, said to have been fired by a friar called Gábor, also referred as Tüzes Gábor ("Gabriel Fiery"). According to contemporary sources, the explosion killed as many as 1,500 Turkish soldiers and caused a wave on the Danube that washed away artillery batteries and guards standing on the opposite shore.


title: Buda Castle

text: Habsburg military engineers made several plans and drawings of the buildings in subsequent decades. Although the walls mainly survived, the burned-out shell rapidly decayed from a lack of maintenance. Between 1702 and 1715, Stephen's Tower disappeared completely, and the palace was beyond repair. In 1715, King Charles III ordered the demolition of the ruins. Johann Hölbling surveyed the still-existing structures. The king ordered the surviving marble statues, antiquities, inscriptions and coins should be spared (there is no evidence about the realization of the royal decree). The main part of the palace and the Broken Tower were totally demolished, the hollows and moats were filled and a new flat terrace was established. The southern fortifications, zwingers and rooms were buried under tons of rubbish and earth.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1715 a small Baroque palace was built according to the plans of Johann Hölbling. It was a simple rectangular building, with an inner court and a shorter side wing, which was later demolished. The Hölbling palace is identical with the core of the present-day palace, where the Baroque Court of the Budapest Historical Museum is now located.


title: Buda Castle

text: The interior of the palace was left unfinished when work stopped in 1719. The Hofkriegsrat commissioned Fortunato di Prati to make several plans for the palace, but lack of money hindered their implementation.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1723 the palace was accidentally burned down and the windows were walled up in order to stop further deterioration. Several drawings from the 1730s and 1740s show the unfinished decaying shell of the simple two-storey blockhouse. Some engravings show an idealised finished version which never existed. Sometime around 1730 the roof was repaired.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1748 Count Antal Grassalkovich, President of the Hungarian Chamber, appealed to the public to finish the derelict palace by means of public subscription. Palatine János Pálffy called upon the counties and cities to award grants for the project. The moment was favourable because relations between the Hungarian nobility and the Habsburgs were exceptionally good. The Hungarians supported Queen Maria Theresa in the dire need of the War of the Austrian Succession. The queen was grateful for this, and the new Royal Palace became the symbol of peace and friendship between the dynasty and the nation.


title: Buda Castle

text: The plans of the splendid, U-shaped Baroque palace with a "cour d'honneur" were drawn by Jean Nicolas Jadot, chief architect of the Viennese court. After 1753 the plans were modified by his successor, Nicolaus Pacassi. Ignác Oraschek, master builder, who guided the works, and modified the plans according to his own ideas. The foundation stone of the palace was laid on 13 May 1749, which was the Queen's birthday. The work continued at a good pace until 1758, when financial difficulties caused a seven-year break. By that time only the interiors were left unfinished. According to surviving historical documents, the layout of the palace followed Jadot's signed plans of 1749. The façades, some interior elements and the St. Sigismund Chapel are the works of Nicolò Pacassi, while the special double false domes were probably planned by Oraschek, formerly the master builder of Count Grassalkovich. Double false domes were typical features of the so-called Grassalkovich-type Baroque castles like Gödöllő. However, this feature was later removed from the palace.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1764 the Queen visited the palace and allotted 20,000 thalers a year for the work, which recommenced in 1765 according to the plans of Franz Anton Hillebrandt. Hillebrand altered the "cour d'honneur" façade of the central wing in Rococo style. In 1769 the St. Sigismund Chapel was consecrated and the palace was finished the same year. According to the aggregate statement of Grassalkovich, the costs were 402,679 forints.


title: Buda Castle

text: The future of the complex was uncertain; the Queen had no intention to use it as a royal residence, because she did not spend much time in Buda. In 1769 she gave one wing to the Sisters of Loreto, who came from Sankt Pölten. The building was handed over on 13 May 1770, but the elegant Baroque rooms were considered unsuitable for a nunnery. Alexander Keglevich, rector of the Eötvös Loránd University, had provided financing to Maria Theresa, which supposedly should have been repaid, according to her letters to her children and friends. In 1777 the Queen decided that the University of Nagyszombat should move to Buda.


title: Buda Castle

text: The nuns moved out and the palace was hastily adapted to use as a university. The work was guided by Farkas Kempelen and led to classrooms, teacher's cabinets, museums, a library and a university press being built. In the front, the false dome was removed and a four-storey observatory tower, planned by Alfred Hillebrandt or Karl Georg Zillack, was erected.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1778 Hillebrandt built a new chapel for the first king of Hungary, Saint Stephen's, the mummified right hand, which was recovered by Queen Maria Theresa from the Republic of Ragusa in 1771. The Chapel of the Holy Right was situated near the St Sigismund Chapel, in the middle of an inner court. The outer form was octagonal and the inside was oval, crowned by a dome. The altar-piece was painted by Joseph Hauzinger.


title: Buda Castle

text: The ribbon-cutting ceremony of the university was held on 25 June 1780, the 40th anniversary of the coronation of the Queen. The throne room became a splendid aula decorated with frescoes depicting the four faculties. In 1953, two grisaille frescoes were discovered on the shorter sides of the room.


title: Buda Castle

text: Functional problems of the university remained unresolved, which led to the faculties being moved to Pest in 1783. In 1791 the palace became the residence of the new Habsburg palatine of the Kingdom of Hungary, Archduke Alexander Leopold of Austria. After the early death of the palatine in 1795, his younger brother Archduke Joseph succeeded him, followed by Archduke Stephen. The palatinal court in Buda Castle was the centre of fashionable life and high society in the Hungarian capital.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1810 the palatinal palace was damaged by fire, but in the next decades, plans were made to raise the building with an upper storey, but they were not implemented, although the observatory tower, which hindered the work, was removed. In 1838 the crypt of the St. Sigismund Chapel was rebuilt according to the plans of Franz Hüppmann: the Palatinal Crypt was the burial place of Palatine Joseph and his family. The crypt is the only part of the palace that survived the Second World War.


title: Buda Castle

text: Palatine Joseph established gardens on the southern and eastern hillsides of the Castle Hill according to the plans of Antal Tost. The gardens of Buda Castle were among the most famous English-style landscape gardens in Hungary.


title: Buda Castle

text: Palatine Stephen left the palace on 23 September 1848 when a break between the liberal Hungarian government and the dynasty became inevitable.


title: Buda Castle

text: On 5 January Buda was occupied by the Austrian army led by Alfred I, Prince of Windisch-Grätz. The chief commander lodged in the royal palace.


title: Buda Castle

text: On 4 May 1849, the Hungarian army, led by Artúr Görgey, laid siege on Buda Castle, which was being defended by General Heinrich Hentzi. On 20 May the Hungarians captured Buda with an assault. The palace was the last stronghold of the Austrian troops, and became a site of heavy artillery fighting. The ensuing fire consumed the central and southern wings; they were completely burned out and their interiors were destroyed.


title: Buda Castle

text: The palace was rebuilt between 1850 and 1856 by Josef Weiss and Carl Neuwirth. The 13-axis central wing was raised with a third storey and a squat attic-tower. The central risalit was decorated with a balcony of six colossal columns. With these changes, the former Viennese Baroque palace of Maria Theresa became considered a more austere Neoclassical Baroque building.


title: Buda Castle

text: The ballroom was redecorated with marbles and stuccoes. After 1853 stately rooms were designed in a French Rococo style, with white-gold stuccoes and furniture from the Hofburg. The palace was already too small for the needs of the royal court, so the kitchens and service rooms were housed in the neighbouring Zeughaus. The palace was connected with the Zeughaus by a glassed passageway.


title: Buda Castle

text: On the western side of the "cour d'honneur" two smaller buildings were erected, using plans by Weiss and Neuwirth in 1854. The two-storey "Stöckl" housed the apartments of the archdukes and imperial officials, whereas the Wachlokal was built for the royal guards. Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria visited Buda Castle in 1856 and 1857. After the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867, Franz Joseph was crowned king of Hungary. The palace played an important part in the lavish ceremony and was a symbol of peace between the dynasty and the nation.


title: Buda Castle

text: In the last decades of the 19th century Budapest experienced rapid economic development. Ambitious urban planning projects were carried out to express the growing wealth and higher status of the Hungarian capital, with special attention being paid to the rebuilding of Buda Castle. The autonomous Hungarian government intended to create a royal palace to match any famous European royal residence (especially their old rival, Vienna's Hofburg). The rebuilding spanned forty years, between 1875 and 1912, and caused sweeping changes in topography of the entire area.


title: Buda Castle

text: First the Várkert-bazár (Royal Garden Pavilion) was built on the embankment of the Danube, at the foot of the Castle Hill, between 1875 and 1882. This Neo-Renaissance gateway was designed by a Hungarian architect named Miklós Ybl. The structure was an open arcade, with pavilions, stairways and ramps, and two blocks of flats. Ybl also built a new waterworks pumping station, named Várkert-kioszk (Royal Garden Kiosk), and two stair towers against the medieval cortina walls. The southern stair tower followed French Renaissance style, resembling a small turreted castle, while the northern stair tower was similar to a Gothic brick donjon (a fortified main tower from a castle, also called a keep). Only Várkert-bazár and Várkert-kioszk survive currently.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1882 Prime Minister Kálmán Tisza charged Ybl with drawing a master plan for rebuilding the palace. In his 1885 plan, Ybl preserved the old Baroque palace, but mirrored it on the western side of the "cour d'honneur", which doubled the size of the residence. He also planned a new carriageway on the western hillside, demolishing the medieval walls and towers of the Újvilág-kert terrace. The narrowness of the natural plateau of the Castle Hill meant there was not enough space for the new Krisztinaváros wing, which Ybl solved by erecting a substructure down to the foot of the hill. The monumental western façade sits on this windowless, three-storey high substructure. The whole block covered almost the entire hill, but the main façade on the "cour d'honneur" had the same modest height as the Baroque palace. The façade was clad with stone slabs, while the old parts are stuccoed; hence, the difference between the original Baroque and the Neo-Renaissance wings is obvious. The formerly open "cour d'honneur" became a closed court with an arched gateway, guarded by the four lions of the sculptor, János Fadrusz. The court is called Lions Court (or "Oroszlános udvar").


title: Buda Castle

text: The work began on 1 May 1890, but Ybl died on 22 January 1891. His successor, Alajos Hauszmann, slightly modified the plans of the Krisztinaváros wing. In 1896 the building reached the level of the court, and King Franz Joseph ceremoniously laid down the foundation stone of the palace, which was soon completed.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1893, the 25th anniversary of King Franz Joseph's coronation was celebrated in the Royal Palace. However, the old banqueting hall proved to be too small, so Hauszmann enlarged the room by knocking down and reconstructing the wall towards the "cour d'honneur" (which additionally had the Hillebrandt façade).


title: Buda Castle

text: In spite of this expansion and Ybl's new wing, the palace was still deemed insufficient for great royal celebrations, so another round of construction began. The north wing, standing on the site of the old Zeughaus, was completely designed by Hauszmann. The architect doubled the Baroque palace on the Danube side, generally imitating its traditional architectural style. At the meeting point of the old and the new wings, a colonnaded portico was erected, with a lavishly-decorated tympanum (with allegorical statues by Károly Sennyey) and a flight of stairs called the "Habsburg Stairs". The whole palace was crowned with a dome with a copy of the Crown of St. Stephen at its apex. The dome, like other details of the north wing, shows German "Jugendstil" influences, as does the rear façade towards the western forecourt. This forecourt also contains the Matthias Fountain (Hungarian: "Mátyás kútja") by sculptor Alajos Stróbl. Above the main gate, towards Szent György tér, stood a statue of the Goddess Hungaria. This side was the main façade of the complex, but it was much shorter and less characteristic than the long Danube façade. The old Chapel of the Holy Right was demolished to make room for a carriageway.


title: Buda Castle

text: Hauszmann designed a new riding school in the former Újvilág terrace, which was now named the "Csikós" court, after the Csikós statue of György Vastagh (now in the western forecourt). In front of the long Danube façade, an equestrian statue was erected in honour of Prince Eugene of Savoy, the victorious leader of the Habsburg army in the Battle of Zenta. The eastern forecourt was closed off with a lavish wrought-iron rail, which ended in a pillar crowned by a statue of the legendary Turul, the sacred bird of the Magyars, spreading its wings above Budapest. Two flights of stairs led up to the Szent György tér, which was on much higher ground.


title: Buda Castle

text: In the western forecourt, Hauszmann designed a new neo-Baroque guardhouse and rebuilt the old Royal Stables. The Royal Gardens on the southern hillside were famous for their precious plants, glass houses and picturesque terraces. In the middle of the gardens stood the Swiss House of Queen Elisabeth, furnished with Hungarian folk art objects. The house was built above the ruins of the medieval gatehouse, partially making use of them.


title: Buda Castle

text: The interior of the palace was decorated and furnished exclusively with works of the leading Hungarian artists of the age. The Royal Palace was officially inaugurated in 1912. Contemporary critics praised it as the most outstanding Hungarian building of the turn of the 20th century.


title: Buda Castle

text: The Hauszmann palace existed for around three decades: on 30 December 1916, the building played a part in the coronation ceremony of the last Hungarian king, Charles IV of Hungary. After the 1918 revolution and the removal of the Habsburg dynasty, the Royal Palace became the seat of the new regent of the Kingdom of Hungary, Miklós Horthy. Horthy lived in the Krisztinaváros wing with his family between the years of 1920 and 1944. In this era the palace was the centre of Hungarian political and social life. Famous guests entertained by Horthy in the palace included King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy in 1937 and Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (later Pope Pius XII) in 1938.On 16 October 1944 a Nazi German commando unit, led by Otto Skorzeny, occupied the Royal Palace and forced the regent to abdicate. Buda Castle was the last major stronghold of Budapest held by Axis forces during the siege of Budapest between 29 December 1944 and 13 February 1945. The German and Hungarian forces defending the castle attempted to break the Soviet blockade on 11 February 1945, but failed. Allegedly the Soviet Red Army knew about their plans and had aimed heavy weapons at the possible escape routes hours earlier. This is considered one of the biggest disasters of Hungarian military history.


title: Buda Castle

text: Heavy fights and artillery fire rendered the palace into ruins. The furniture vanished, roofs and vaults collapsed and the southern and western wings were burned out. The destruction was comparable to that of the great siege of 1686.


title: Buda Castle

text: Immediately after the war, archeological research was begun in order to unearth the remains of the medieval castle. The research, led by László Gerő (1946–1966) and László Zolnay (1967–1979), was likely the biggest castle excavation in Europe. The former Royal Gardens stairways, pavilions and glass houses, which dated from the turn of the 20th century, had to be sacrificed. Important parts of the former Sigismund and Matthias Palace had survived under the thick earth fill.


title: Buda Castle

text: The first reconstruction plan of the medieval remains was written by László Gerő in 1950 and finalised in 1952. The reconstruction work was finished in 1966. Contrary to the generally accepted principles of historic reconstruction, the medieval fortification system was rebuilt in its entirety. Important elements like the 16th century Great Rondella and the medieval Gatehouse, the Mace Tower, the walls and the zwingers were reconstructed according to the results of the archaeological research and contemporary pictorial evidence. The low-lying southern wing of the Gothic palace was also reconstructed, together with the vaulted Gothic Hall and the Lower Church of the former Royal Chapel. Medieval-style gardens were planted in the zwingers. The foundation of the Stephen's Tower was unearthed, but as archaeological evidence was lacking, the tower was not reconstructed. The remains of the Broken Tower were covered again.


title: Buda Castle

text: The large-scale reconstruction of the medieval fortifications substantially changed the cityscape of Budapest. At the time it was considered a highly successful project, reconciling historical authenticity with urban-planning demands.


title: Buda Castle

text: In the 1970s, archeological research continued on the northern and western side of the palace, led by László Zolnay. It produced many important achievements, including the Late Gothic Buda Castle Statues. The Karakash Pasha Tower, in the "Újvilág Garden", was a Turkish-era tower demolished at the end of the 19th century. Photographic evidence enabled its reconstruction, but the new tower was only a copy of the original, and the details are not considered authentic.


title: Buda Castle

text: The government made a decision about reconstruction only in 1948. According to contemporary photos, all the important interiors were in a damaged state, but their reconstruction was technically possible. The new communist government of Hungary considered the Royal Palace a symbol of the former regime. Therefore, Hungarian leaders chose to thoroughly modernise the interior and exterior of the palace. Architectural trends played a part in the decision, as modernist architects had condemned the Hauszmann style as "too ornate".


title: Buda Castle

text: The first modernist reconstruction plan was made by architect István Janáky in 1950. His controversial concept was later modified. In 1952 the Hungarian government asked for help from Poland, because they had successfully rebuilt Warsaw and, indeed, other cities. A delegation of Polish experts, led by the architectural historian Jan Zachwatowicz, proposed the rebuilding of the Hauszmann palace. During the 1950s the palace was gutted and all the remaining interior, including the rooms and halls that were undamaged, were destroyed. Important exterior details, such as the main entrance, the Habsburg Steps, the dome, the Royal Stables, the guardhouse and the riding school were demolished, and the remaining façades were simplified. In Lions Court the ornate gates of "King's Stairs" and "Diplomat's Stairs" were demolished. The doorway of the castle church disappeared, as did the chapel. The detailed Neo-Baroque roofs were simplified and plain new windows were installed. The allegorical sculpture group of the tympanum was destroyed.


title: Buda Castle

text: At the same time, medieval elements were uncovered and reconstructed. No precise drawings existed of them, so an approximate reconstruction of their appearance was done.


title: Buda Castle

text: The modernist dome was designed by Lajos Hidasi in 1961 after Italian Baroque models. The palace was rebuilt by 1966, but the interior spaces were ready only in the 1980s. Buda Castle became a cultural centre, home to three museums and the National Széchényi Library.


title: Buda Castle

text: In March 2006 the National Office of Cultural Heritage finalised the long-term development plan of Buda Castle. Asserting that the modernisation in 1952–66 caused irreversible damage, they proposed the partial reconstruction of the façades, including the dome and the Habsburg Steps. No decision has been reached about the realization of the development plan.


title: Buda Castle

text: On 25 July 2007 Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány chose the medieval King's Cellar in Buda Castle as the place to announce the list of the "most important public works projects", which was financed by European Union funds between 2007 and 2013.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 2008 an international consortium began to build an underground garage for 700 cars under the former Csikós Court. The developer was granted permission to demolish a section of the 15th-century castle wall. The demolition was carried out in spite of criticism from archeologists and the public. The area had been previously excavated by archeologists, who discovered many important finds, including medieval children's toys and a tooth from the pet leopard of King Matthias Corvinus. Additionally, the area outside the inner walls was used as a garbage dump during the 15th–17th centuries. However, financial difficulties interrupted the construction of the garage in 2009; work resumed for a short time in November 2011 but stopped again after the completion of the concrete basement slab. The government granted 1.3 billion forint for the completion of the project in 2015 after the half-built garage was bought by the state.


title: Buda Castle

text: The castle courtyard was also used as the setting for Katy Perry's 2010 music video, "Firework", part of her "Teenage Dream" album.


title: Buda Castle

text: The government formulated the "National Hauszmann Program" to revitalize and restore the castle in the period of 2019−2030. The program is named in honour of Alajos Hauszmann, the last major architect of the castle. The first phase of the program started in 2016. By 2019, the reconstruction of the Royal Riding hall, Stöckl Staircase and the Castle Guards' Barrack had been completed and the rebuilding of the Ybl Slope next to the barrack started. In the same year, further reconstructions are announced, namely Joseph Archduke's Palace, former Headquarters of the Ministry of Defense, and the former Ministry of Foreign Affairs' building.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 2019, the prime minister's residence was relocated to the Buda Castle from the Hungarian Parliament Building. The move was first planned in 2002 during the first Fidesz government, but was never carried out.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1958–1962, architect László Gerő partially recreated the façades of the Gothic castle facing the narrow southern, western and eastern courts. Only the ground and first floors were reconstructed; the castle was originally much higher. The unfinished façade stops at the level of the Baroque terrace above, with two windows opening towards the southern court and another two opening towards the eastern court. The four almost-identical windows are square, four-panel stone constructions of very fine Gothic craftsmanship, with their outer frames decorated with small columns. One window, which had been walled up, was discovered "in situ" during archeological research, and the others were reconstructed from fragments by the sculptor Ernő Szakál by means of anastylosis. The ground floor openings are simpler. An arched stone doorway gives access to the southern court from the cellar under the Gothic Hall.


title: Buda Castle

text: The façade was originally plastered. The whitewashed surface was decorated with a painted pattern in a rusty hue, resembling rustication. Fragments of painted geometrical decoration, a common feature on the medieval buildings of Buda, were discovered on the eastern façade, but it was not restored.


title: Buda Castle

text: A Gothic balcony tower projects from the wall at the end of the eastern façade. Its reconstruction was a much debated issue, because the balcony tower goes above the level of the Baroque terrace, disturbing the harmonious panorama of the palace. On the other hand, it clearly indicates that there are higher, missing floors.


title: Buda Castle

text: The balcony tower is a two-storey structure standing on a wide stone basement. The first floor is a solid stone wall without any openings and the niche behind it belongs to the Gothic Hall. The second floor has a balcony with three windows; it is now closed off by a glass wall. Originally it would have been part of an important ceremonial room. The balcony is in the shape of half an octagon. The three Gothic double lancet windows are considered the most important architectural elements of the tower and the profiles; frames and mullions were restored in a simplified form, using many of the original stones. The tower is covered with a flat metal roof.


title: Buda Castle

text: The Gothic Hall is connected to Stephen's Castle ("István vár") on the western side. It was named after Prince Stephen, Duke of Slavonia, the younger brother of King Louis I of Hungary. Built in the 1340s–1370s, it is the oldest part of the medieval royal palace. Only the foundation and three interconnected barrel-vaulted rooms survive.


title: Buda Castle

text: Stephen's Tower ("István torony") was the keep of Stephen's Castle. However, it was destroyed by an explosion in 1686. The ground floor walls were discovered a little time after 1946. It was a square building (11.7 × 11.1 m), built upon the rock surface of Castle Hill. The walls are 2.31 to 2.7 m thick with narrow arrowslits on the southern, western and northern sides. The original doorway, on the eastern side, was walled up after the Gothic Hall was built in the 15th century.


title: Buda Castle

text: Stephen's Tower was originally a free-standing structure, sited differently from later buildings. The triangle in front of it was walled up to create a continuous southern façade for the palace. During post-war reconstruction, this part of the façade (with a broken stone doorway) was not reconstructed. A vaulted room (6.2 × 6.3 m) on the ground floor was still intact in 1820, according to a contemporary drawing. Although the ribs, corbels and key stone were discovered during archeological research, the room was not reconstructed. A spiral stairway had connected the room with the missing higher floors.


title: Buda Castle

text: The remaining part of the Stephen's Castle (with the barrel-vaulted rooms behind) has a simple stone façade with a Gothic doorway. The pointed arch was later restored.


title: Buda Castle

text: The interior from the time of Maria Theresa and Franz Joseph was mostly destroyed during World War II and the post-war reconstruction, excluding the Palatinal Crypt, which survived both. Little information exists about the interiors from the medieval and Baroque eras, but the palace built at the turn of the 20th century was meticulously recorded, using detailed descriptions, photographic documentation and grounds plans. Architect Alajos Hauszmann said about the royal apartments: "I created a long series of rooms, longer than any similar royal apartments in continental Europe except Versailles."


title: Buda Castle

text: A series of rooms from the medieval castle were unearthed and reconstructed during the post-war rebuilding of Buda Castle in 1958–62. They are now part of the permanent exhibition of the Budapest History Museum in "Building E" of Buda Castle.


title: Buda Castle

text: Only a fragment of the medieval castle survived the destruction of 1686–1715. The surviving rooms are not considered the most important ones; and none of the more famous rooms and buildings mentioned in the medieval sources exist today. The rooms which were unearthed after 1946 were only saved by chance and by their geographical position at a lower level than the newly created Baroque terrace. The Gothic Hall and the Palace Chapel were built by King Sigismund Luxemburg at the beginning of the 15th century. The castle wing is surrounded by a complex system of medieval fortifications.


title: Buda Castle

text: The first chapel in the castle was probably built in the 14th century during the reign of Louis I of Hungary. Eberhard Windecke claimed in his Chronicle that Charles II of Hungary was murdered in 1386 in a room from which the royal chapel could be seen. The chapel was again mentioned in the Chronicle of Lorenzo de Monacis, which was written around 1390.


title: Buda Castle

text: King Sigismund of Luxemburg thoroughly rebuilt the old Anjou castle during the first decades of the 15th century. He erected a Gothic church in place of the former chapel. The Anjou castle's façade was now facing towards the inner palace courtyard, and the long chancel was projecting from the eastern side of the palace. The chancel was built upon a lower church due to a lack of space on the narrow plateau. The church had a nave and an chancel. The flamboyant Royal Church of Buda Castle was similar to the more famous Sainte-Chapelle in Paris.


title: Buda Castle

text: Archeological research proved the date of the church, because 15th-century strata were discovered under the intact brick floor of the lower church.


title: Buda Castle

text: In November 1489, Sultan Bayezid II of the Ottoman Empire sent the relics of John the Almoner to King Matthias Corvinus. The King placed the relics in the Royal Chapel, which was re-dedicated and embellished with Renaissance furniture. In 1526, Buda was plundered by the Ottoman Turks after the Battle of Mohács. The relics were rescued in time and carried to Pressburg, where they are still kept currently. A surviving church inventory from 1530 shows a wealth of furnishings. Later, King János Szapolyai converted the lower church into a bastion. The large Gothic windows were walled up; and only the rectangular arrow slits were left open.


title: Buda Castle

text: In 1541 the Ottoman Turks captured Buda without resistance, and the Royal Church ceased to be a place of Christian worship. The upper church was destroyed in the 1686 siege of Buda, and the ruins were demolished in 1715. The vault of the lower church collapsed, and the interior was filled with rubbish. The remains were then buried under the new Baroque terrace for two centuries.


title: Buda Castle

text: The ruins of the lower church were discovered by archeologists in 1949–50. The remains were buried in 1953 because of conceptional disputes about the possible reconstruction. The chapel, finally reconstructed by 1963, was re-consecrated in 1990.


title: Buda Castle

text: The Gothic Hall is one of the most important surviving examples of secular Gothic architecture in Central Europe. It was built by King Sigismund of Luxemburg in the early 15th century as an extension of the earlier Anjou palace. It was built on the southern edge of the natural rock plateau of Castle Hill. The level difference between the plateau and the southern court was about . A vaulted cellar was built under the hall to span this difference.


title: Buda Castle

text: The Gothic Hall is an irregular rectangle of , with a closed niche on the eastern side, which is the inside of the balcony tower. It is divided into two naves with Gothic rib vaults. The vaults are supported by two massive pillars which come up through the floor from the cellar beneath the room, and in addition, half-pillars in the corners support the ribs. All six vaults are quadripartite, and the two on the inner side are irregularly shaped.


title: Buda Castle

text: The hall has four windows, two on the southern side and two on the eastern side, with stone benches in the window niches. The Hall was connected to the palace through a door in the northern wall, supposedly on the place of the original doorway. The northern section of the floor is three steps higher.


title: Buda Castle

text: All the newly built side walls were plastered and painted white, while the original stone surfaces were left uncovered. The ribs, pillars, arches and window niches were restored by sculptor Ernő Szakál in 1961–62. The ribs have a simple profile, but fragments of a more complicated type were also found in the rubble, together with keystones. These pieces supposedly belonged to another stately hall situated above the room, but they were built into the reconstructed vaults by restorers in the 20th century.


title: Buda Castle

text: The northern pillar of the Gothic Hall was already discovered by Alajos Hauszmann at the beginning of the 20th century. The remains were buried under the outbuildings of the Royal Gardens, and Hauszmann protected the medieval pillar by building a brick shaft around it.


title: Buda Castle

text: Three interconnected barrel-vaulted rooms belong to the oldest part of the palace, Stephen's Castle, which was built by Prince Stephen, Duke of Slavonia, in the 14th century. The northern room is larger () than the southern ones (). The northern room is covered by an east-west axial vault while the southern rooms have north-south axial vaults.


title: Buda Castle

text: The southern room is connected to the inner courtyard by a doorway. There is a small window high on the western wall. The middle room has a similar window. The larger northern room has three slit windows, one facing west and two facing north, all had iron rails. The rooms were connected to each other with carved Gothic corbel doors. The walls were originally plastered. In the southern room, a medieval stairway led to a trapdoor and a medieval toilet hidden in the empty space between the walls of the castle and the keep.


title: Buda Castle

text: The barrel vaulted rooms were supposedly used as a prison in the Middle Ages. Later the southern vaults collapsed. The intact barrel vault of the northern room was broken by Alajos Hauszmann at the beginning of the 20th century when he filled the cellar with rubble. The barrel-vaulted rooms were restored in 1958–1962.


title: Buda Castle

text: A medieval cellar north of the barrel-vaulted rooms, later called "Albrecht pince" (Albrecht Cellar), is covered with a Gothic brick barrel vault. The walls are blackened from burning. The cellar was probably built by King Sigismund of Luxemburg as the "Cisterna Regia", i.e. the great underground cistern of the palace.


title: Buda Castle

text: The Cisterna Regia was situated under the former northern zwinger of the palace. This small rectangular courtyard became a private royal garden during the reign of King Matthias Corvinus. The private garden was an early Renaissance "giardino segreto" (hidden garden). It was designed by architect Chimenti Camicia in the 1470s. A well in the middle of the garden was fed by the cistern underneath.


title: Buda Castle

text: The hidden garden, the well and the cistern survived the 1686 siege of Buda. They were indicated on the plans of the area drawn by military architect Joseph de Haüy in 1687. In 1715–1724 the former Cisterna Regia became the cellar of the new Baroque palace. A section of this room was later used as an ice chamber.


title: Buda Castle

text: The King's Cellar ("Király pince") is not a medieval structure, but a Baroque-era brick cellar under the Danube side of Building E. It was filled with tons of earth and rubble, and the original eastern façade of the medieval royal palace survived under the fill. The inner walls of the Baroque palace were actually built upon the old façade. Only the basement section of the original façade remained.


title: Buda Castle

text: This wing was built by King Sigismund of Luxenburg in the early 15th century and was rebuilt by King Matthias Corvinus 50 years later. The surviving eastern façade was built from large, finely carved blocks of stone. It followed the contour of Castle Hill with a break in the middle. A buttress was added and a rectangular tower with two buttresses on its corners. The lower part of a balcony on the tower was reconstructed, with three elegant Gothic corbels decorated with cusps.


title: Buda Castle

text: It was not possible to demolish the King's Cellar because the whole Baroque palace was resting upon it; the inner fill was removed in 1961. The medieval façade was reconstructed inside the cellar space between 1961 and 1965. Large windows were cut in the outer wall of the cellar to let in the daylight. Currently, the architectural history of the palace is discernible by viewing the interwoven layers of the past.


title: Buda Castle

text: On 25 July 2007 Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány chose the King's Cellar as the place to announce the list of the "most important public works projects", financed by European Union funds between 2007 and 2013.


title: Buda Castle

text: The "Zenta" Room (""Zenta" előterem") was on the first floor of the Baroque wing, was situated next to the audience antechamber. It opened from the main staircase of the central wing and was the first room of the ceremonial apartments on that side. In the early 1900s, it had a white-golden stucco decoration with one chandelier. The name of the chamber referred to the large painting of the Battle of Zenta contained therein.


title: Buda Castle

text: The Audience Antechamber ("Fogadási váróterem") was situated north of the ballroom on the first floor of the Baroque wing. In the Baroque era it was called "Antichambre Ihrer Majestät der Kaiserin" ("Antechamber of HM The Empress"). The room gave access to Maria Theresa's private apartments from the ballroom. In the early 1900s, the audience antechamber became part of the ceremonial apartments and had the same white-golden Rococo stucco decoration as the white antechamber on the other side.


title: Buda Castle

text: The Grand Throne Room ("Nagy trónterem"), formerly known as the ballroom ("Nagyterem"), on the first floor of the Baroque wing had several layers of Baroque decoration from the second half of the 18th and the 19th century. Two surviving drawings record the oldest form of the room. Jakob Schmutzer's drawing from 1777 shows the opening ceremony of the Eötvös Loránd University after it was moved to the palace. The room had a Late Baroque decoration with double grooved Corinthian pilasters between the windows and stucco garlands. The walls were decorated with Vinzenz Fischer's frescoes of the four faculties. József Pollencig's drawing from 1795 shows a ball scene in the "Prunksaal". The pilasters were kept, but the frescoes were already covered, and the whole room was stuccoed. On the vault the coat-of-arms of the Kingdom of Hungary can be seen. After the destruction of the 1849 siege, the room was redecorated in Neo-Baroque style. In 1892 the old ballroom was rebuilt with a new ceiling and a gallery towards the Lions Court; three of its side walls were preserved. It was enlarged again after 1896. The function of the ballroom was given to another new hall and this room was converted into the main throne hall instead. In the early 1900s, the room had a Rococo white-golden stucco decoration with three large chandeliers.


title: Buda Castle

text: Vinzenz Fischer's frescoes were re-discovered in 1953 during the post-war reconstruction. In spite of this, all the decoration layers were destroyed. Today it houses the Gothic altar collection of the Hungarian National Gallery.


title: Buda Castle

text: The White Antechamber ("Fehér előterem") is on the first floor of the Baroque wing and was situated south of the throne room. In the Baroque era it was called "Zweytes Antichambre" ("second antechamber"). In the early 1900s it had a Rococo white-golden stucco decoration with one chandelier and a white Rococo stove.