The story
Gyula Castle Days in Gyula
Commemorating the 1566 Ottoman siege of Gyula Castle, this late-July living-history weekend brings around 200 costumed reenactors to stage battle recreations and storytelling at Central and Eastern Europe's only intact flatland Gothic brick fortress. Organizers stage the reenactment's climax at dusk, when torchlight and smoke effects give the mock battle real dramatic weight.
Roughly thirty thousand Ottoman troops laid siege to Gyula Castle in 1566, defended by only two to two-and-a-half thousand Christian soldiers, in what became one of the longest sieges in Hungarian military history before the fortress ultimately surrendered under terms negotiated between constable Laszlo Kerecsenyi and Pasha Pertev, Suleiman the Second's brother-in-law, after supplies ran out and dysentery spread through the defenders.