Golubac Fortress — fortress
Image by fotos1992 from Pixabay

Golubac Fortress

Голубачки Град

  • 2 min read
  • 44.661° N 21.678° E

Interesting facts

  • In the Middle Ages a heavy chain is said to have stretched from the fortress to Babakaj, a rock on the far bank, letting Golubac control and tax river traffic.
  • The name means roughly 'Pigeon Town', from the Serbian word golub, though nobody knows for certain why the fortress was called that.
  • According to a later folk legend, a Serbian girl named Golubana rejected an Ottoman pasha's gifts and was left to die on a rock by the river.
  • In 1427 the fortress's commander, refused a payment of 12,000 ducats by King Sigismund of Hungary, handed Golubac over to the Ottomans instead.
  • During the 1428 siege, Cecília Rozgonyi commanded one of the Hungarian ships on the Danube and is credited with rescuing King Sigismund from capture.
  • In 1481 a Hungarian raid sank 24 Ottoman ships at Golubac, and the Ottoman pasha of Smederevo was beheaded at the fortress gate.
  • The Ottomans later wrapped the old square towers in polygonal and round casings up to two metres thick, adapting them to resist cannon fire.
  • Tower 1, a citadel with an eight-sided base and a round spire, was nicknamed the 'Hat Tower' by the 19th-century traveller Felix Kanitz.
  • One of the towers contains a small Serbian Orthodox chapel built into its ground floor, a key clue that a local Christian lord raised the oldest part.
  • The Iron Gate dam, built from 1964 to 1972, raised the Danube so much that the once-dry cannon tower now stands in the river.

Why it is worth it

Golubac Fortress guards the gateway to the Iron Gates, the long gorge where the Danube squeezes through the Carpathians between Serbia and Romania. It stands on the Serbian bank a few kilometres downstream from the town of Golubac, at a point where the river is exceptionally broad, with Romania's village of Coronini on the far shore. Ten towers climb from the water's edge up a steep crag, linked by walls two to three metres thick, and the silhouette, a staircase of battlements stepping up the rock, is one of the most dramatic of any castle on the river.

The fortress was most likely built by the medieval Serbian state in the 14th century and is first recorded in Hungarian sources in 1335. It was raised in three enclosures over time; most of its towers were originally square, and the first nine rise twenty to twenty-five metres, with two portcullis gates and the remains of a palace inside. For more than a century Golubac changed hands between Serbs, Hungarians and Ottomans, often serving as the last stronghold between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. In 1428 a large Hungarian army besieged it, and the celebrated Polish knight Zawisza Czarny died in the retreat that followed.

For decades the main Danube road ran straight through the fortress gates. Between 2014 and 2019 the site was restored with European Union support, a 152-metre road tunnel diverted the traffic, and the restored fortress welcomed visitors again from April 2019 as part of the protected area of Đerdap National Park. The visitor area is divided into zones by ease of access, and from the walls the view takes in the river spreading wide below and the gorge beginning to close in to the east.

Getting there

The fortress lies about 4 km east of Golubac on the Danube road through Đerdap National Park. Požarevac, the nearest larger town, is about 39 km away in a straight line. The nearest airport by distance is Timișoara (TSR) in Romania, about 130 km away; within Serbia, Niš Constantine the Great Airport (INI) is about 148 km away; a car is the practical way to reach the fortress.

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From the encyclopaedia

The Golubac Fortress was a medieval fortified town on the south side of the Danube River, 4 km (2.5 mi) downstream from the modern-day town of Golubac, Serbia and 2 km across the Danube from the village of Coronini, Romania. According to recent discoveries, the fortress, which was built during the 14th century by Medieval Serbian state, is split into three compounds which were built in stages. It has ten towers, most of which started square, and several of which received many-sided reinforcements with the advent of firearms. Towers were not connected for easier defense. Serbian Medieval frescos were recently found inside the fortress.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

44.66119, 21.67848per Wikidata