SZENTKERESZTY CASTLE

“Apart from this, Arcuș presents a very picturesque sight, and, in addition to its ancient fortified church situated on a hill, Baron Zsigmond Szentkereszty’s beautiful castle, which stands splendidly in the foreground of the village, in the middle of a magnificent landscaped garden, also contributes greatly to its picturesqueness.” This is how Balázs Orbán mentions the castle in Arcuș, which is a distinctive monument of the Historicist architecture of Háromszék.

Arcuș first appears in written sources in 1332, in the form Arkus. The village’s first known landowning family was the Benkő family. According to an inventory from 1773, the family had two manor houses in Arcuș at that time, one of which was “… at the lower edge of the village, on its southern side, a manor house made of stone, together with its associated buildings, barnyards, vegetable gardens and orchards”, while the other was “… in the middle of the village, on its northern side, a manor house built of stone”. Of these, the manor house standing in the lower part of the village was, in all likelihood, the predecessor of the castle.

Sometime during the first half of the 19th century, under unknown circumstances, the estate in Arcuș came into the possession of the Daniel family. Gábor, the son of Elek Daniel de Vargyas, an assessor of the Royal Court of Appeal, was already born in Arcuș in 1824. In 1829, an inventory was prepared of the estate owned by Elek Daniel. The inventory also describes the two manor houses in detail. According to the source, the building standing on the site of the castle was among the more distinguished manor houses of Háromszék; it was a shingle-roofed building with two porches, two cellars beneath it and ten rooms. In addition, a mill, a garden and farm buildings also belonged to it.

The estate was purchased in 1840 by Count György Kálnoky de Kőröspatak, but he died not long afterwards, in 1844. After his death, his estates passed to his widow, Countess Anna Haller. In 1847, the widow remarried, to Baron Zsigmond Szentketeszty. This is how the estate in Arcuș came into the possession of the Szentkereszty family in the middle of the 19th century.

András Szentkereszty, from the market town of Szentkereszt in Hungary, was the first member of the family to settle in Transylvania. In 1727, he received Kelemen Mikes’s confiscated estate in Zagon (Zágon), from which the baronial family’s territorial designation also derives. By the 19th century, they already owned estates in several Transylvanian settlements, including Vidrasău (Vidrátszeg), Dârlos (Darlac), Chinari (Várhegy) and Boiu (Kisbún).

Baron Zsigmond Szentkereszty fought in the 1848–49 War of Independence as a major under General Bem, for which he was imprisoned in Sibiu (Nagyszeben) for two years. Between 1851 and 1853, his wife managed the household of the estate in Arcuș. The baroness was primarily occupied with laying out the garden, but she also began extending the manor house. The manor house was completely rebuilt in 1870, following Zsigmond Szentkereszty’s return home. The inventory of 1871 describes the manor house and also mentions the gardens and farm buildings belonging to the estate, as well as the structures located in the park. In 1873, Zsigmond Szentkereszty entrusted the management of the estate to his son, Béla. He and his wife retired to the estate in Boiu, where they spent the remainder of their lives.

Like his father, Baron Béla Szentkereszty (I) began his career as a soldier. After leaving military service, he moved to Arcuș in 1870 and participated in political life from there. He was first a Member of Parliament representing various towns and later, during the years of the First World War, served as Lord Lieutenant of Háromszék County. From 1896, he was an Imperial and Royal Chamberlain. In 1878, he married Mária Florescu, who came from a Romanian princely family and was the daughter of the Romanian general and former Romanian Minister of War Ioan Emanoil Florescu. His connection to the Romanian princely family significantly aided his political activities after the First World War. In politics, he fought primarily for the cause of the Hungarians. At the end of the 19th century, the couple substantially transformed the manor house. The construction work took place in several stages, from 1887 to 1897. The castle was designed by the architect Sándor Fort, who is mentioned in the sources from 1888 onwards.

Following the death of Béla Szentkereszty (I) in 1925, the estate was inherited by his son, Béla Szentkereszty (II) the Younger. Béla Szentkereszty (II) was likewise active in political life on behalf of the Hungarian minority. As president of the Háromszék branch of the Hungarian Party, he supported the cause of the Székely National Museum. His literary work is also worthy of mention, and his writings appeared in the pages of Vasárnapi Újság and Székely Nép. Known as an eccentric baron, Béla Szentkereszty never married and lived alone in the guesthouse of the castle in Arcuș. In 1944, he committed suicide before Russian soldiers occupied the castle.

The castle in Arcuș was nationalized after the death of Béla Szentkereszty. It subsequently served several functions: it housed an orphanage and a mechanical engineering school and was also used by the local agricultural production cooperative. For a time, artists’ camps were organized in its garden, as recalled by the wooden sculptures located in the park. In 1982, the castle became the property of the Romanian Communist Party and was maintained as a residence for the head of state, Nicolae Ceaușescu. Accordingly, the building was significantly altered. The castle received entirely new furnishings and decorative elements; its carved, silk-upholstered furniture, chandeliers and stucco decorations were all made at this time. The ornate staircase beside the grand ceremonial hall, which had once been made of oak, was also replaced at this time with a reinforced-concrete structure. Very little of its former furniture has survived. Despite the alterations, Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu never set foot in the building because they did not consider it secure enough.

After the change of regime, the castle came under the administration of the Ministry of Culture and became a cultural center. For a time, the Shakespeare Society of Sfântu Gheorghe (Sepsiszentgyörgy) held annual Széchenyi balls here.

The last owner of the castle before its nationalization, Béla Szentkereszty (II), died without an heir. His elder sister, Janka Szentkereszty, married Endre Jankovich-Besán, and their only child, Elemér, was born in 1908. Elemér Jankovich-Besán’s marriage to Christine Hoenning O’Carroll produced a son, András Jankovich-Besán, who reclaimed the castle in Arcuș and its associated estate in 2004. Although a final court decision ordering the restitution of the castle was issued in 2012, the Cultural Center operating in the castle petitioned for the case to be retried, and the conflict therefore dragged on for many more years. The castle finally became the property of the family in 2020. András Jankovich-Besán, who had reclaimed the castle, died in 2010, before the conclusion of the legal proceedings, so his son, Elemér Jankovich-Besán, continued the struggle and ultimately recovered the family inheritance. The family’s aim is to integrate the castle into the tourist and cultural circuit. In 2020, the “Floating Cinema&Theater” event was organized here, as part of which a stage was erected on the island located in the middle of the lake in the castle park. Spectators could watch film screenings, theatrical performances and concerts from the shore of the lake or from boats. Since 2021, the Sic Fest festival has been organized in the castle park.

The Szentkereszty Castle in Arcuș was built at the end of the 19th century in the Historicist style. Its appearance is dominated by Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Baroque features. The manor house of the Benkő family once stood on its site and was later altered several times. The new castle was designed by the architect Sándor Fort, who was frequently employed by Hungarian aristocratic families. In Budapest, he designed rental palaces for the Károlyi and Cziráky families. Between 1882 and 1886, he participated in the construction of the Andrássy Castle in Betliar (Betlér), and around 1882 he supervised the interior renovation of the Andrássy Castle in Parchovany (Parnó). Following the alteration and extension of the Szentkereszty Castle in Arcuș, he also designed a residential building in Budapest for the family in 1898. Of the plans he prepared for the castle in Arcuș, only a cross-section of one of the building’s wings has survived.

The two-storey castle consists of a long main wing with a rectangular ground plan, intersected at right angles by a shorter wing. The longer wing of the building is covered by a gable roof, while the shorter cross-wing has a mansard roof, topped by a terrace enclosed by a wrought-iron railing.

The main façade faces east, and the remains of a fountain can be seen in front of it. Its prominent element is the terraced central avant-corps supported by Tuscan columns. A semicircular-headed door leads onto the upper-floor terrace, which has a wrought-iron parapet and is framed by two straight-headed windows. The simple windows are accentuated by semicircular frames. The openings are articulated by pilasters with Corinthian capitals. A broad cornice runs beneath the roof, bearing a pattern formed by a row of intertwining ellipses decorated with rosettes. This ornamentation also appears on other parts of the castle and is a favored motif of Neo-Baroque architecture. Another Neo-Baroque architectural element is the scroll-shaped structure crowned by a pediment, which decorates the roofs of the central avant-corps. The main entrance opens on the lower level of the central avant-corps, set between two straight-headed windows.

The garden façade is also emphasized by the avant-corps formed by the cross-wing. On the lower level of the avant-corps, a terrace with an access staircase was constructed in front of the entrance. At the corners of the wrought-iron parapet stand enormous stone vases decorated with mythological and biblical representations. On the upper level are three straight-headed windows accentuated by semicircular frames and separated from one another by pilasters with Corinthian capitals. The northern and southern side façades terminate in scroll-shaped gables imitating the formal language of the German Renaissance. The tops of the gables, which end in semicircular arches, are formed by an elaborately designed shell motif. With the exception of the avant-corps, the façades of the castle are decorated with rows of straight-headed windows fitted with shutters. On the upper floor, the windows are accentuated by prominent hood mouldings.

Although the exterior of the building still preserves its late-19th-century appearance, the former appearance of the interior rooms is now recalled only by archival photographs and postcards. The furnishings and interior decoration fell victim to looting after the Second World War and subsequently to the alterations of the 1980s.

Two ceremonial rooms opened on the ground floor. The larger one may once have been the great hall. Its oak-beamed ceiling, bordered by a dentilled cornice, fortunately survived the 20th century. The door leading to the adjoining room has also survived, its frame decorated with carvings inspired by the formal vocabulary of the German Renaissance. The second-largest room on the ground floor may once have been the ballroom, as its furnishings consisted only of a few Rococo chairs and divans. The walls were decorated with large tapestries depicting scenes of rural life. The stucco decoration of the ceiling can still be seen today. The drawing room opened from the ballroom and was decorated with portraits of family members, a fireplace covered with strapwork ornamentation and a Rococo mirror placed above it. Suites of seating furniture arranged in smaller groups were placed in the drawing room. Based on contemporary photographs, a room with a wooden ceiling opened from the drawing room, containing a large table and upholstered, fringed armchairs. This may have been a study or reading room. The building had two staircases. The larger one opened beside the great hall and was significantly altered in the 1980s, when its oak staircase was replaced with one made of concrete. The smaller staircase is located at the southern end of the castle.

The castle was surrounded by an imposing dendrological park, the remains of which still recall its 19th-century appearance. The inventory prepared in 1871 also describes the park in detail; it contained a waterfall, a lake, a lookout tower, the “Anna Grotto” and a “schweiczer house” (a simple type of rural house), as well as a bowling alley and a riding school. Several unusual tree species can still be found in the garden today, including the tulip tree, Russian olive and copper beech. A guesthouse once stood near the castle and can also be seen in contemporary photographs; Béla Szentkereszty (II) lived there at the beginning of the 20th century. The single-storey, colonnaded Neoclassical building no longer stands today.

Beside the castle is an unusually designed funerary chapel whose appearance combines Neoclassical and Gothic Revival stylistic features. The chapel, dedicated to Saint George, was most likely built after the early death of György Kálnoky, at the commission of his widow, Anna Haller. The chapel’s spire contains a bell made by István Kiss, a master bell founder from Sfântu Gheorghe, which was cast in honor of Saint Anne in 1845. If the bell was originally made for this chapel, the building must already have been standing before 1845. The chapel erected in honor of Saint George continued to serve as the family’s burial place. Baron Zsigmond Szentkereszty, Anna Haller, Baron Béla Szentkereszty (I) and Baron Béla Szentkereszty (II) were once laid to rest here. It was looted in the years following nationalization.

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