Photos

Komárom - the town of fortresses

The first fortress was built on the important strategic place near the confluence of the Danube and the Vág rivers by the Romans 2000 years ago.
The construction of the present day buildings started in the 16th century on the place of the perished old castle.

The fortification system of Komárom was the greatest and the strongest fortification building of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and was built for the army of two hundred thousand soldiers. The fortification system consists of the following objects:

A - The old fortress (from the 16th century)
B - The new fortress (from the 17th century)
C - The bridgehead of the river Vág (from the beginning of the 19th century)
D - The Danube bridgehead (from the beginning of the 19th century)
E - The Palatine line (1839 - 1847)
F - The Vág line (1865 - 1870)
G - Fort Monostor (1851 - 1871)
H - Fort Igmánd (1871 - 1877)

The forts on both sides of the Danube are genuine historic and cultural treasures, representing the highest level of military architecture of their time and having survived unaltered since the beginning of the 20th century. These forts, and their predecessors have been built and rebuilt over the centuries, but their current forms show the most skilled building techniques and styles from the second half of the 19th century (1852-1890).
Nowadays there are efforts to get them on the UNESCO list of the world and cultural heritage.

The forts thought to have been unoccupyable and they really were. Yet, they were very easy to occupy by just a few signatures in Versailles after the first world war.
The town of Komárom (and Northern Hungary) has been under Czechoslovakian/Slovakian occupation since 1920. The forts on the northern bank of the Danube now temporarily belong to Slovakia, the southern ones are in Hungary.
The picture was taken in one of the northern buildings.

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