Taródi castle
Perhaps the most special attraction of Sopron is the Taród Castle, also called Fool's Castle and Owl Castle. For the most part, it is the 50-year work of one single man, István Taródi, who used 150-200 railway cars of stones and bricks in the course of the construction until his death in 2010.
Already as a teenager, István Taródi was dreaming of building a castle. He started with building a wooden castle on his parents' plot. His real dream came true on 1 May 1951, when he bought a plot of land on the Nándor Hill at the top of the Lőverek in Sopron and moved the wooden castle there. He placed a stuffed owl on one of the balcony-supporting beams, after which the locals named the strange building Owl Castle. He began the construction of the 4,000-square-metre stone castle that you can see today in 1959.
He worked as a painter and after his working hours he obsessively devoted all his free time and a significant part of his earnings to build the castle. For this reason, the locals considered him an eccentric, hence the name Fool's Castle.
You can enter the castle over a 3-meter-deep moat through the drawbridge and find everything that is typical of a medieval knight's castle: the living area, the well, the knight's hall, the wine house, the drawbridge, the spiral stairs as well as the castle bath.
