Szigliget Óvár

Little is known about the building on the hill named “Queen’s Skirt”, to the best of our knowledge it is a 15.4 x 28.8 meter rectangular building with a pentagonal tower on the south side towards the Lake Balaton and a 5.4 x 8 meter square tower on the north side.  Based on its 2 meter thick walls, it is a 2-storey building, the distribution of its interiors can be deduced from the pillars. No artifacts have been found from before the 15th century, the charred floor shows that it burned down when it was destroyed. According to Gergely Buzás, it is a 2-storey manor house, which, although not interspersed with windows and doors matching the aristocratic splendor of Kornis Castle (Szentbenedek), could have been a very similar building, spiced with a series of portholes on the top level. The building is not depicted anywhere, although Mathias Zündt’s map (which can be said to be authentic for many castles) shows a building between Szigliget Castle and Lake Balaton, which is suspected to depict this building. According to some assumptions, the station of the boatmen was the Old Castle. In a letter written in 1647, the captain of the Szigliget castle, Gáspár Tóti Lengyel, asked for labor for the flotilla of Lake Balaton, to cut the road to the port in the reeds. In his letter, he mentions that for the military port, “I will mend the castle for the protection of our country at my own expense.” This may have been the Old Castle, because it is in the right location to see the supposed harbor, which is not visible from Szigliget Castle. It is also about 1.5 km from the port. Based on this information, with the help of Gergely Buzás, we created the theoretical reconstruction model of Óvár for the film that can be seen at the Szigliget castle exhibition.