The Obelisk of Horea, Cloșca, and Crișan commemorates three leaders of the 1784 Transylvanian Peasant Revolt, who were executed in Alba Iulia after their uprising against serfdom was suppressed by Habsburg forces. The monument stands inside the citadel and is one of several in Romania honouring figures who, though crushed in their own time, became nationalist heroes in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The story of the revolt connects directly to the contradictions of Habsburg rule in Transylvania — a region where Romanian-speaking Orthodox peasants were subject to Hungarian and Saxon landlords under an administrative system that denied them basic political rights. The three men's execution in this very city, and the later declaration of Romanian unification in the same place in 1918, gives Alba Iulia a particular intensity as a site of national memory.