St Gerard's Statue and the Witches' Hill

Look up at the bronze bishop raising his cross over the city. This is Gerard, Gellért in Hungarian, a Venetian monk who came to Hungary in the time of King Stephen and became the first bishop of Csanád. The hill above you is named after him because of the way he died.

1The bishop's death

In 1046, after Stephen's death, a pagan revolt led by Vata broke out against the new Christian order. Gerard fell into the rebels' hands as he tried to cross the Danube. The medieval legends of his life say they put him on a cart, threw him off the top of this hill and finished him off below, by the river. Much later a grislier version caught on: that they rolled him down inside a barrel studded with nails. That version doesn't appear in the earliest sources.

The statue, by Gyula Jankovits, was unveiled in 1904, together with the colonnade and waterfall that frame it.

2The witches' hill

For centuries the hill had another reputation. In the witch trials of the 17th and 18th centuries, several accused women testified that they went to their gatherings "on St Gerard's hill". The phrase came to mean going to a witches' sabbath in general. Folklorists think it may come from old commemorations of the bishop's death.

The trial records are real; witches flying to the hill came from the imagination of the age.

3What to look for

• The raised cross of the bishop, facing Pest.
• The pagan figure at his feet, standing for his killers.
• The waterfall beneath the colonnade.