Your city was likely built on seven hills

or an investigation of a historical meme

If you ever visit an old historic city with a guide, you are likely to hear that it was built on seven hills. I’ve heard this about my city, Lublin, as well as Zamość, Sandomierz, Kraków, and cities in nearby Ukraine (L’viv and Kyiv), Lithuania (Vilnius), Moscow in Russia, Prague in Czechia, and more. At this point, it’s an inside joke between my wife and me whenever we visit a new city.

The connection to the seven hills of Rome is obvious (which historic city wouldn’t want to be 'like Rome'), but at first, I thought it was specifically a Polish thing because of a mnemonic often used in history lessons in Polish schools. To help kids remember the traditional founding date of Rome (-753), we are taught the saying 'na siedmiu wzgórzach pięć trzy się Rzym' (literally 'on seven hills, five three Rome,' but 'pięć trzy' sounds like 'piętrzy,' which makes it 'on seven hills stands Rome').

So, every kid in Poland knows one thing about Rome - that it is built on seven hills. And every guide hired for a school trip has that one way to instantly connect with their audience. Few can resist.

But the explanation isn’t complete. Why do cities outside Poland (where I assume they don’t use our mnemonics because they don’t work) also claim to be built on seven hills? How likely is it that so many cities were built on exactly seven hills, like Rome? And isn’t it weird that historically the most important city in Western culture (Rome) was built on the magical number of hills in the first place?

Well, seven is the magic number in most Western cultures, and it’s not a new thing. The week has seven days. The Bible uses 7, 7*7, and 77 as 'infinity' in many places. It’s a significant number. When you count the hills, you need to stop at some number - and what better number to stop on than seven? The only contender I can see is three because apparently 'God loves three' - I have thoughts on that as well, BTW). In any case, three would maybe be too few for this application. Any real city built in a landscape that isn’t completely flat will have hundreds if not thousands of hills, depending on how you count. Seven is supposedly about the limit of our short-term memory (or is it? Suspicious again). So seven will do.

According to a paper by Gościwit Malinowski (badass name, BTW - Gościwit means “Guest Welcomer”) - having 7 hills was a precondition to be a capital city in medieval Europe, Rome was often in ancient times called “the city of 7 hills”, and even cities that were built before Rome were sometimes “corrected” after the fact (like Athens).

To confirm our hypothesis we can check for cities built on seven hills in the cultures where seven isn’t magical. Here’s the (incomplete) list of seven-hill-cities and indeed, there are:

• 48 cities in Europe (including 9 capitals)

• 31 in Americas (including 2 Romes :) )

• 11 cities in Asia (all of them in countries connected in some way to western countries or semitic mythology).

• 4 cities in Africa,

• and 2 in Oceania.

I wondered if there’s an equivalent meme in China or Japan, but the only similar thing I found was 8 mountains of Kowloon in Hong-Kong

Which concludes this investigation. Next subject will probably be “why God loves 3 and if the dual number in Hebraic has anything to do with it” :)