Esterházy Palace is the largest rococo building of its kind in Hungary. The original manor house, which is the core of the building, was constructed in 1721 by Anton Erhard Martinelli.

Esterházy Palace History

Between 1764 and 1784 Prince Miklós Esterházy extended it on the basis of his own plans, although Melchior Hefele was the architect chiefly involved in its rebuilding.

Several architects, including Miklós Jakoby, collaborated on the project. The park was created in the Baroque style and is also credited to Esterházy, although after his death it fell into disrepair. Parts of the building were damaged in 1944 and 1945 during WWII, and restoration was carried out in 1958 and 1959.

The elevation of the main building is a three-story central block of eleven bays, the three central bays of which have an additional story and project slightly.

The ground floor is banded, and the balconied stories above are articulated by giant pilasters. Two wings of the same elevation as the central block extend out, forming a large cour d’honneur, the inner angles of which are curved.

The court is closed off at its front end by balconied wings of one story with blind arcades and by an ornate Rococo wrought-iron gate adorned with vases. A fountain of a cherub with a dolphin is in the center of the courtyard. Six bays of the garden façade project toward the extensive formal gardens designed in the French manner.

The grounds originally had a music house where Joseph Haydn was a resident composer and Kapellmeister from 1761. On the ground floor, the Sala Terrena (one of 126 rooms) has a ceiling frescoed (1766) by Josef Ignaz Mildorfer.

Johann Basilius Grundmann executed a fresco of Apollo on the Chariots of the Sun in the banquet hall on the first floor; the room also contains sculptures of the Four Seasons by Johann Joseph Rössler. The chapel has frescoes by Mildorfer. After years of neglect, the interior of the palace was restored by Zsigmond Babics at the end of the 19th century.

Esterházy Palace Location

Esterházy Palace Address: Eszterháza 9431 Fertőd, Joseph Haydn út 2, Hungary. Get directions using the map provided below:

Esterházy Palace Map

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Buda Castle History

The Buda castle’s origins can be traced back to the 14th century. The earliest excavated remains of the palace came from the István Tower, named after Louis I’s brother Stephen (1332–1354).

Adjoining it, around an inner courtyard, were two wings of the Angevin palace, begun under Louis, which comprised the hall, the treasury, and the royal office of records. In the east wing was a double chapel, of which the lower part has been uncovered.

King Sigismund of Luxembourg (1387–1437) extended the Angevin castle by adding an L-shaped court bounded on the north and east by the so-called Frischer Palace, first mentioned in 1424; according to the written sources, this was never completed. Flanking this courtyard was an enormous unfinished donjon, the Csonka Tower. The system of defense walls and gate towers around the castle, still mostly intact, was also built under Sigismund.

Construction continued under Matthias Corvinus (1458–1490), who built a Renaissance palace in the east wing that included his library, the Biblioteca Corviniana, an observatory, living quarters, and a throne room.

The earliest recorded date in this building is 1479, the year of the contract to the Florentine builder Chimenti di Leonardo Camicia. Florentine influence is clearest in the portico built around the trapezoid inner court of the Angevin palace. The cistern and hanging garden in the west wing were probably based on similar works in Urbino and were possibly also influenced by the Trattato de Architettura of Antonio Filarete.

Work on Matthias’s palace continued under Vladislav II Jagiellon (1490–1516), and the whole of Buda castle was heavily fortified against the Turkish threat by John I (1526–1540).

Under the Turkish occupation of the 16th and 17th centuries the Buda Castle fell into ruin, and the 18th-century palace, which formed the kernel of the later Royal Castle, was built partly on the filled-in medieval ruins.

The south wing of the royal palace was built between 1715 and 1735 on the ruins of its predecessor, to a design by Fortunato de Prati; from 1749 the west wing was converted to a Baroque royal residence by Ignác Oraschek, working to designs attributed to the court architects Jean-Nicolas Jadot de Ville-Issey and Nikolaus Pacassi.

This had two courtyard blocks joined by a central wing, decorated with rustication and a giant order of pilasters. From 1757 the Hungarian Treasury in the palace was built by Franz Anton Hillebrandt, who had to modify it in 1762 to house the church of the English Young Ladies (Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary), and again in 1777 for the University, which was transferred from Nagyszombat (today Trnava, Slovakia) until its final establishment in Pest in 1790.

The castle was decommissioned in 1875 and at once renovated in a historicist style, beginning with the building of the Castle-Bazaar by Miklós Ybl from 1875 to 1881. Ybl also began the neo-Baroque restoration of the Royal Palace, which was continued up to 1905 by Alajos Haussmann, who doubled the size of the Danube wing. The castle was badly damaged in World War II.

The medieval remains were excavated from 1948 to 1963 and again from 1967, and their partial reconstructions are exhibited in galleries beneath the Széchenyi National Library and the Historical Museum, while the architectural and sculptural fragments, with many smaller finds, are exhibited in the Historical Museum in the south wing.

Buda Castle Sculptures

The most significant sculptures from the Royal Palace, a group of damaged statues carved from local limestone, were excavated in the forecourt in 1974. They had been used as infill in the 15th century. Most of the statues were either half-finished or had been broken while being carved, or it is probable that none of them reached the buildings for which they were intended. All the sculptures are now in the Budapest Historical Museum.

The group comprises religious figures including saints, the Virgin, Apostles and prophets, secular figures, bishops, royal knights, and ladies with their retainers and shield carriers in ceremonial court dress. Stylistically, they are contemporary to King Sigismund’s palace, and perhaps, in particular, to work in the main hall of the so-called Frischer Palast. Their unfinished state may be connected to the break in the building work.

The source of the sculptures cannot be directly identified from their inscriptions, but Bertrandon de la Brocquière, the Burgundian envoy to Budapest, mentioned the departure of the masons working at Buda in 1433. The royal arms of Bohemia found on the fragment of a helmet-ornament unearthed with the statues indicate a date after 1419 when Sigismund was crowned King of Bohemia.

The statues were probably carved over a relatively short period by a large team of sculptors. Most of the figures show close links with the soft style practiced in Lower Austrian sculpture, particularly associated with works by the master of grosslobming. A smaller group seems to be the work of a master from Brabant, or more specifically from the Lower Rhine region around Cologne and Aachen.

The combined styles may have influenced local sculptors, in particular one whose sculpted heads and cubic-type clothes transcend the dominant soft style and who can perhaps be identified with a sculptor of red marble tombs at Buda around 1430 known as the Master of the Stibor grave-slabs. Buda Castle sculptures’ stylistic and iconographic affinities with French court art may demonstrate Sigismund’s taste for representational art, presumably acquired during his travels as Holy Roman Emperor through Western Europe from 1412 to 1419 in connection with the Council of Konstanz. These statues are the most extensive group of secular sculptures of the period, and their undisputed provenance gives them added significance.

Buda Castle Location

Buda Castle Address: 1014 Budapest, Szent György tér 2, Hungary. Get directions using this map:

Buda Castle Map

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