Regeci Castle (Ruins)

The castle first appears in certificates from 1307 as possession of Amade of the Aba clan, an oligarch of Northern Hungary at the time. According to our present knowledge a tower was erected on top of the rock in the upper castle encircled by an irregular oval shaped castle wall. After the fall of Adade’s sons in the battle of Rozgony (1312) the castle got into the possession of Peter son of Petenye, from whom King Charles Robert could only take it by besieging it in 1316. The king kept the castle in his possession, and later King Louis the Great also liked to spend time between its walls as he loved to hunt in the forests nearby. In the second half of the XIV century or at latest in the first decades of the XV century the arched castle wall of the upper castle was demolished, and a square shaped one was built there instead, with multi-leveled building wings on the inner sides of the wall, and a closed inner yard. At the end of the 1420s the castle was given to Steven Lazarevics Serbian monarch who fled to Hungary, and later to George Brankovics by King Sigismund. Regec getting back in the hands of the King again in 1459 was given by King Mathias Corvinus to the Szapolyai family. This is the time when the walls were built enclosing the middle castle defining the extension of the castle to the rock of the lower castle. At this time the lower castle must have stood already. We have no available data about the building history of this part. In the end of the XV century below the upper castle a gothic palace building was erected connecting tightly to it. After the death of John Szapolyai, Regec has been attained by the Seredy family in 1541 and by the Alaghy family from 1560. Under this period started the development of the castle into a renaissance residence. The keep has been rebuilt, and a bastion was built onto its corner. Two square shaped bastions were built on the eastern side of the castle as that part was easier to attack. In front of the eastern walls a ditch was dug and a rampart was created on the other side. The north-eastern corner of the castle has been reinforced and heightened, and later a square shaped bastion was built in front of it. At the same time the south-western corner of the castle was also reinforced by a huge bastion – through which an entrance led to the middle castle yard. Along the middle castle yard a construction was constant until the beginning of the XVII century when the castleyard was totally built in from all sides. The castle was attained by Nicholaus Esterhazy in 1635. From him George Rakoczi I captured it after a siege. After this the castle remained in the hands of the Rakoczi family. In the end the castle was demolished by the emperor’s men in 1685, after the kuruc rebels of Stephen Thokoly gave it up.