The English Gardens of the Károlyi Counts Palaces – first results
The English Gardens of the Károlyi Counts Palaces – first results

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents first results of the DOMUS scholarships projects on the Károlyi palace gardens in Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. The paper presents the motivation and the goal of the projects to analyze this cross-country heritage with its history up to preservation today. The gardens are presented in the wider historic context which includes English gardens in Hungary but also historic gardens which have to do with the history of Carei, from where the properties of the Károlyi counts spread over the Kingdom of Hungary after the century of Swabian immigration. The research questions and methods are presented, followed by first results. The methods were adapted for performing this study during the pandemic, when only few of the gardens were visited in the past, using comparative landscape architecture analysis. The results regard building a webpage which presents this approach, as well as an inventory of the gardens using existing databases. This inventory extends the proposal of the gardens to be studied from the project based on the main palace of the counts. Nevertheless, the history is shown for a few gardens which were also visited or exchange was done about them and which mainly belong to the main gardens of Károlyi palaces. Some of these gardens underwent several restorations connected with changes in the configuration throughout history. Restoration intervention used the European opportunities set by this cross-country heritage for funding. However, most gardens are English gardens, and thus they related to the Hungarian context set at the beginning. Although the inventory is larger than the main gardens set as target in the project and reported in earlier works, the other gardens are sometimes grouped in clusters around these. From these the ones around Nagymágocs are to be highlighted. The connect through their neighboring to Kiskunfélegyháza to the gardens in Coltău and to the history of 1848, and thus to the century of English gardens in Hungary.

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