Taródi-vár

You can feel it right away: Taródi-vár wasn’t built to impress in the usual way. It was built like a life project—hands-on, stubborn, and intensely personal. And the name tells you who it belongs to: it’s named for its builder and longtime owner, Taródi István.

A builder who couldn’t stop

Taródi István was born in 1925 and died in February 2010, at 85 years old. He’s also tied to Sopron in a more quiet way: his grave is in the city’s Szent Mihály-temető. His story starts long before the stone version of the castle. In 1945, as he neared his twentieth birthday, he lived with his parents and three brothers in a rental apartment in a city-center tenement on Ősz utca 12. In the courtyard of that building, he began his first “fortress”: an 8-metre-tall wooden castle, built from available timber. He finished it in 1946, shortly after getting married. And then he planned his next step. The idea was simple: if he managed to buy land in Lövérek, he’d dismantle the wooden castle and rebuild it on his own plot. That moment came in 1951, May 1st, when he bought the property where the stone castle stands today and moved the wooden structure there soon after.