Heroes’ Tower
Listen at the stop, then read the transcript and follow the sources behind the story.
Listen
Transcript
Heroes’ Tower is much younger than the event it commemorates. It was built in the twentieth century, when Kőszeg was actively monumentalising both the 1532 siege and modern wartime sacrifice.
That gap between event and monument matters. Memory changes according to the needs of the present. In the interwar period, historic resistance and national continuity carried particular political weight in Hungary after the territorial losses of the First World War. The tower therefore tells two stories at once: one about sixteenth-century defence, and another about a twentieth-century society deciding which historical qualities it wanted to celebrate.