Sárvár’s main sight is the pentagonal Nádasdy Castle that dominates the town, reachable by a low bridge across a dry moat. The palatial interior of the Ferenc Nádasdy Museum was the venue for some of the grisly murders committed in the 17th century by Erzsébet Báthory – the wife of Ferenc Nádasdy, or the ‘Black Captain’, though any mentions of Sárvár’s most notorious resident are conspicuously omitted from the museum’s displays, adding to her mystery.
Parts of the castle date from the 13th century, but most of it is 16th-century Renaissance and in good condition despite the Austrian crown confiscating much of the castle’s contents as punishment for the Nádasdy family’s participation in the 1670 rebellion. As a result, many of the furnishings, tapestries and objets d’art you see today were collected from other sources.
One thing the Habsburgs could not take with them was the rather dramatic ceiling fresco in the Knight’s Hall, picturing Hungarians – the Black Captain included – battling the Turks, painted by Hans Rudolf Miller in the mid-17th century. The other striking feature of the hall is the ornate 16th-century cabinet of gilded dark wood and marble.
The museum also has one of the nation’s best collections of weapons and armour that belonged to the Nádasdy Hussars – a regiment of fast, lightly-armed cavalry. See if you can spot the sabres in bejewelled scabbards, a rather dramatic painting of a warrior with a winged helmet on horseback, and a ceramic stove with clawed feet amidst the uniforms, paintings of the Hussars in action and other paraphernalia.
Among the exhibits about the castle and Sárvár is the printing press established here, and some of the then inflammatory Calvinist tracts it published. One work in Hungarian, entitled The Pope Is Not the Pope – That’s That and dated 1603, was later vandalised by a Counter-Reformationist who defiantly wrote ‘Lutheran scandal’ across it in Latin.
Finally, there’s a priceless collection of some 60 antique Hungarian maps donated by a UK-based expatriate Hungarian in 1986, the star being the 1520 map of Europe.
