Varjúvár (Crow Castle)

“…and so I got hold of a tiny little piece of steep mountainside in Sztána, even higher than the train station, and there I stuck a tiny little house.”
This house that once belonged to Károly Kós was built in 1910 near the train station of Sztána and became Károly Kós’s spiritual home and his family’s everyday home.
In Europe at the turn of century, numerous artists regarded the home as an opportunity for a new lifestyle. For Károly Kós, Crow Castle, built next to Sztána village in Kalotaszeg, represented the means to an ideal lifestyle: departure from the city for the sake of country life.
“And I just stand on the fringe of the mountain knowing, and right now feeling with every inch of my body, that I am standing smack in the middle of the Kalotaszeg that as a free gift gave me every abundance of her amazing beauty gathered and tended over a thousand years of work in the treasure-house of her soul.”

Originally built as a vacation house and artist ranch, at the start of World War I it became the architect’s temporary home and, from Christmas 1918 on, his permanent home. In 1925 it was expanded with a two-story addition. There was a study on the upper floor and a servant’s room on the ground floor, and in the middle section a kitchen on the ground floor, and upstairs a bedroom that functioned as a study until 1925. In the distinctive tower there was a dining room and parlor downstairs, and upstairs a children’s room that functioned as the bedroom until 1925. In October 1944 it was ransacked, then became property of a Sztána landowner for a few years until it was repurchased by the family.