BETHLEN PÁL CASTLE

Beclean (Bethlen) first appears in written sources in 1305, in the form Bethlem. Until the beginning of the 15th century, the estate of Beclean was held jointly by the Becse-Gergely kindred and by the Apafi and Bethlen families descended from it. By the 1410s, most of the landowners already belonged to the Bethlen family, who established the centre of their estates here and also derived their noble predicate from this place. In 1438, the sons of János Bethlen (III), Gergely, Miklós and Antal, received permission to build a stone or wooden castle. The castle was probably built only in the second quarter of the 16th century, during the time of Farkas Bethlen (I), since its first written mention dates from 1543.

In 1552, half of the estate of Beclean passed into the hands of the Patócsi family through marriage. The Patócsi family lost the estate after the Battle of Sânpaul (Kerelőszentpál) in 1575, after János Patócsi and György Patócsi sided with Gáspár Bekes and fought against Prince István Báthory. The prince granted the estate of Beclean to Kristóf Báthory. The other half of the estate of Beclean also passed out of the ownership of the Bethlen family, as János Bethlen (VII) mortgaged it around 1572 due to financial difficulties. In 1604, King Rudolf’s commissioners in Transylvania mortgaged the castle and the estate belonging to it to Benedek Mindszenti. From 1616, it was held by the Haller family for four decades, and from 1659 it was held in mortgage by Pál Béldi, commander of the princely cavalry. A tragic event also took place in the castle’s marketplace in the second half of the 17th century: on 17 December 1674, Dénes Bánffy, Lord Lieutenant of Doboka County and Captain General of Cluj (Kolozsvár) who had been accused of disloyalty, was beheaded here.

Pál Béldi lost the estate of Beclean in 1678, and Prince Mihály Apafi I granted it to the Bethlen brothers, Gergely (VI), Farkas (III) and Elek (II). On this occasion, an inventory of the estate was also drawn up, from which a picture of the former castle emerges. The fortification, equipped with four corner bastions, was surrounded by a deep moat fed by the waters of the Someș. The palaces and servants’ buildings were arranged along the walls. The brothers who regained the ancient family estate were members of the Elek principal branch of the Bethlen family. All three were born of the second marriage, to Katalin Kemény, of Ferenc Bethlen, the Lord High Steward who was elevated to the rank of baron in 1651.

At the end of the 17th century, the castle was ordered to be strengthened, and imperial troops were stationed within its walls. During the Kuruc War of Independence, the castle changed hands several times, and in 1705 Ferenc Rákóczi also stayed within its walls for a short time. Following the Peace of Satu Mare (Szatmár), the imperial authorities ordered the demolition of the castle. Its stones were used for the Bethlen family’s later construction projects. According to some sources, the castle gate stood opposite the courtyard of Pál Bethlen’s manor house.

Little information is available about the construction history of Bethlen Pál’s manor house. What is certain is that, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Count Pál Bethlen (VII), a descendant of the princely councillor Elek Bethlen (II), began extensive construction work on the estate. The aristocrat probably remodelled a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century Baroque building, which also appears on the map of the First Military Survey, produced between 1769 and 1773. The Baroque manor house of András Bethlen, which stood near the church and was built in the middle of the eighteenth century, can also be identified on the map.

The builder of the manor house, Count Pál Bethlen (VII), was the son of Count Pál Bethlen the Elder and Countess Mária Bethlen. He completed his secondary education in Budapest and his university studies in Zurich. After obtaining his degree, he undertook an extended journey abroad and then served in the military for five years. He returned to his estate at Beclean at the end of the 1870s. Between 1892 and 1905, he served as Lord Lieutenant of Beszterce-Naszód County, and later also obtained the office of Lord Lieutenant of Szolnok-Doboka County. Pál Bethlen married twice. His first wife, Countess Gabriella Rhédey, died young, after only four years of marriage. Their daughter Ida, whose fate was tragic, drowned at the age of 15 near the mill at Beclean. Her funerary monument is the finest work in the Bethlen family cemetery at Beclean. In 1885, he married his second wife, Jolán Tisza. Jolán’s sister, Ilona, married István Tisza, the future prime minister, at the same time. The double wedding took place in Cluj, in the Reformed Church on Farkas Street (today Mihail Kogălniceanu). Pál Bethlen and Jolán Tisza had two sons, Károly and László, and two daughters, Jolán and Etelka. Of the children, only László reached adulthood. Jolán and Etelka died of illness, while the elder son, Károly, was killed in the First World War.

The manor house was still owned by Pál Bethlen during the first decades of the twentieth century, and after his death in 1935 it was inherited by his only surviving son, Count László Bethlen (IX). As an economist, László Bethlen was a prominent figure in the Transylvanian cooperative movement between the two world wars. He became involved in political life following the Second Vienna Award, and between 1940 and 1944 he represented the Transylvanian Party in the Budapest Parliament.

In the 1990s, the manor house accommodated a cultural centre and the town library. Between 2001 and 2015, it housed the mayor’s office of the town of Beclean. It currently stands empty.

During the communist period, in the 1980s, the manor house was significantly altered. Its former ceremonial hall was expanded to almost twice its original size, creating an enormous auditorium within it. The façade was completely simplified and stripped of all its decorative elements. It was also at this time that the family coat of arms adorning the pediment disappeared. Today, only the two corner towers and the enclosed upper-storey balcony on the rear façade recall Pál Bethlen’s construction work and the former appearance of the manor house. A flax-processing factory operated for a time in the manor house’s outbuildings, after which they were demolished. One outbuilding survived and was converted into a museum.

The last owner of the manor house and the estate before nationalisation was Count László Bethlen. After 1945, he emigrated to the West with his wife, Countess Margit Teleki, and their children; his descendants now live in France, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. One of László Bethlen’s daughters, Jolán, became the wife of László Tamás  Baksay. Jolán and one of her sons applied for the restitution of the manor house at Beclean in the early 2000s. The litigation with the state and the subsequent transfer process were protracted, but the family eventually recovered the manor house and the estate belonging to it. Following the restitution claim, the descendants, the sons of László Tamás Baksay and Jolán Bethlen, were unable to reach an agreement concerning the inheritance, and therefore the manor house stood neglected and empty for a long time. The family members who recovered the manor house have since died, and the heirs have abandoned the building.

The circumstances surrounding the construction of the manor house remain unclear to this day, but Pál Bethlen almost certainly had an earlier seventeenth- or eighteenth-century manor house remodelled at the beginning of the twentieth century. The new manor house, built in the Historicist style, was surrounded by a stone wall, while the ruins of the old castle extended beyond the western walls. According to art historian József Sisa, Pál Bethlen commissioned the Moravian-born architect Mór Kallina to design the new manor house. As a representative of the Historicist movement, Kallina primarily designed Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque buildings throughout the Monarchy.

The manor house has an irregular ground plan, which is the result of later alterations. Its core is an elongated rectangular building section, to which sections of various sizes and shapes are attached. A hexagonal tower adjoins both its northern side and its south-eastern corner. The manor house has an upper storey; only the northern tower and the building wing extending beside it are single-storeyed.

The main façade of the manor house faces west. As a result of the alterations carried out in the 1980s, it now presents a simple, poor appearance. Only archival photographs and postcards preserve the memory of its former appearance around 1900. According to these, the main façade of the manor house was dominated by a three-bay central projection and was terminated on both sides by hexagonal towers. The central projection was crowned by a Baroque-style scrollwork pediment, the principal ornament of which was a large Bethlen coat of arms positioned above the cornice with its row of corbels. On either side of the pediment, above the crowning cornice, extended an attic decorated with reliefs. In front of the projection was a terrace with an iron railing, which was reached by a stone staircase. The main entrance to the building opened here. On either side of the entrance was a tall paired window with trefoil decoration. The corbelled motif running across the projection also appeared beneath the crowning cornice of the hexagonal tower.

The main façade was also altered sometime between the two world wars. An upper storey was added to the entire building, and the façades were simplified. A triple window was inserted into the pediment of the central projection, with a Bethlen coat of arms set within a small panel beneath it. The scrollwork termination of the pediment was removed and replaced with a simpler, undulating termination. The prominent cornice with its row of corbels, the relief-decorated attic level and the pilasters were demolished. Some windows were partially walled up, while others were walled up completely. Windows with straight lintels were installed on the façades.

The former furnishings of the manor house are unknown. Only a single large green-glazed fireplace survives on the upper floor, decorated with rich Late Renaissance motifs, a dentilled cornice, an egg-and-dart frieze, and garlands of fruit and flowers. The wooden panelling of the main staircase, which may have been made at the beginning of the twentieth century, is also in good condition.

A beautiful park and an orchard once extended behind the manor house. The trees of the park were cut down in the 1960s, and a housing estate now stands on the site of the carefully maintained conservatory and the well-run stud farm.

Beclean is the ancestral home of the Bethlen family, where several noble residences preserve the memory of the family. Several Bethlen manor houses are known in the settlement and are commonly identified by the names of the family members who owned them at the beginning of the twentieth century. The earliest of these is Pál Bethlen’s manor house, whose antecedents can be traced back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This was followed by the construction of András Bethlen’s manor house and then Béla Bethlen’s manor house. These buildings were significantly altered over the years and have therefore largely lost their former splendour.

To the east of the town, on a hillside, lies the Bethlen family cemetery, in a severely neglected condition. It also contains the damaged gravestone of Ida, the daughter of Pál Bethlen and Gabriella Rhédey, which depicts a girl praying.

1. Zoltán Bicsok – Zsolt Orbán, „Isten segedelmével udvaromat megépítettem…” Történelmi családok kastélyai Erdélyben. Gutenberg Publishing, Miercurea Ciuc, 2012.
2. Beáta Bordás, Erdélyi kastélyépítészet a historizmus korában. 1840–1914. Polis Publishing, Cluj-Napoca, 2016.
3. József Sisa, Kastélyépítészet és kastélykultúra Magyarországon. A historizmus kora. Vince Publishing, Budapest, 2007.