Schloss Rotenturm

Schloss Rotenturm stands in the Burgenland village of Rotenturm an der Pinka. It occupies a site once protected by the Pinka river and deep defensive ditches, traces of which remain near the north-west corner. The present building is a large, late-19th-century country house in a mix of Romanesque, Moorish, Gothic and Renaissance styles. Miklós Ybl, the leading Hungarian architect of the age, was invited to design an extension but declined, recommending instead Antal Weber, a Budapest master-builder trained in Vienna. Construction began in 1862 and was finished two years later under the direction of Johann Lang. The house reached its height when it housed the art collections of Julius and Emilie Erdődy, a cultured aristocratic couple who lived there until 1929. Their holdings included the secret archive of Prince Francis II Rákóczi, the Hungarian freedom fighter, which was destroyed in a 1924 fire. After the Second World War the building was stripped of its fixtures, leaving only fragments of Károly Lotz’s frescoes in the chapel and upper vestibule. A fine 1850 coffered ceiling from Vienna’s former lunatic asylum was later installed in the dining hall. Visitors enter beneath a richly carved balcony supported by slender columns. The eastern front shows a tall tower like a bell-tower, while the chapel on the west is marked by a rounded apse. Every façade carries the same decorative language: coupled round-headed windows, pierced parapets, small corner turrets and open galleries. Inside, the once-grand rooms are largely empty, but the chapel still holds a Carrara-marble Madonna and once contained the coronation chair used by the last Hungarian king in 1916. Beyond the main block a small connecting structure once linked to a second building, together providing seventy chambers.