Károlyi Castle (Fót)

The castle was originally built in the 18th century as a single-story, castle-like building, for Count János Fekete de Galántha.

At the beginning of the 19th century, a floor was added and a small chapel was built, and minor alterations were made around the 1820s and 1830s.

The interior spaces were also significantly transformed: a two-story library with space for twenty thousand volumes, connected by a spiral staircase, was created, the walls of the salon-like interior spaces were decorated with works by renowned painters (including Mihály Munkácsy, Károly Lotz, Antal Ligeti), and the smaller rooms were also transformed into representative decorations, with unique inlaid parquet flooring and their walls decorated with romantic, later historical paintings.

[1] In the 1940s, due to World War II, the family left the castle, which became a front-line hospital.

[4] Around 1995, a descendant of Count István Károlyi, László Károlyi, and his wife moved back to a small part of the castle (on the floor of the left wing building, in the rooms of the former weaving workshop), which they could rent from the Hungarian state, since the laws do not allow ownership (restitution), where they created a modern version of the nobleman's ancient galleries and a small house museum of family and castle history in the foyer of the cinema hall.

Portrait of Count István Károlyi , by Friedrich Lieder , 1853