Sándor-Metternich Mansion: A Noble Country Residence in Hungary
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.8
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Hungary
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Habsburg, Hungarian
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page11 sections
History
Sándor-Metternich Mansion in Bajna, Hungary, is a noble residence that developed into a fifty-nine-room palace during the nineteenth century and became the principal country home of the Metternich-Sándor family. A manor house already occupied the site by the end of the fifteenth century, before the Sándor family acquired it in 1696 and made it the center of their estates.
The Sándor estate
Count Menyhért Sándor (1661–1723), deputy-lieutenant of Esztergom County, a senior county official in historical Hungary, built a hunting lodge on the property and surrounded it with a game garden. Count Antal Sándor (1734–1788) later replaced the lodge with a manor house, completed in 1776. Archbishop József Batthyány consecrated its chapel in the same year.
The Metternich-Sándor palace
In 1834, Count Móric Sándor began converting the manor into a palace in preparation for his marriage to Princess Leontine von Metternich, daughter of Austrian chancellor Klemens von Metternich. He commissioned the Hungarian architect József Hild to assist with the transformation. Móric and Leontine married in February 1835, and the completed mansion became the family’s main country residence.
After Móric died without a male heir, his daughter Paulina Sándor (1836–1921) inherited the estate. Her marriage to her uncle, Richard von Metternich, joined their surnames as Metternich-Sándor. Paulina and Richard modernized the kitchens and introduced gas lighting. Their youngest daughter, Princess Clementine von Metternich-Sándor (1870–1963), was the family’s last owner.
Clementine adopted her grandnephew, Duke Franz-Albrecht von Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfürst (1920–2009), as her heir. He took the surname Metternich-Sándor and lived in Bajna until 1940, where he attended primary school and served in the Hungarian army.
War damage and restoration
The mansion suffered severe damage during the Second World War and was later used as a field hospital and emergency housing. Under communist rule, it became public property and was occupied by a local cooperative. Proposals in the 1970s to turn it into a guest house did not succeed, and a possible use by Indiana University Bloomington was also abandoned. The empty palace and its overgrown gardens and park then continued to deteriorate.
Clementine left the mansion and its estates after the war and departed Hungary in 1947. She spent her final years at Schloss Corvey, one of the residences inherited by Franz-Albrecht when he became Duke of Ratibor. Restoration of the mansion and garden began in March 2018 with European Union funding through Hungary’s national program for castles, palaces, and mansions. The work received an ICOMOS prize in 2021. The restored property opened with an interactive exhibition centered on Count Móric Sándor and his daughter Paulina von Metternich.
Remains
The surviving property consists of a two-storey palace, its landscaped grounds, and estate buildings. The present mansion incorporates several earlier phases, from the fifteenth-century manor and Menyhért Sándor’s hunting lodge to Antal Sándor’s eighteenth-century house and Móric Sándor’s nineteenth-century palace. Restoration addressed both the building and the garden after extensive wartime, postwar, and long-term deterioration.
The palace
Exterior form
József Hild shaped the mansion as a two-storey palace with a portico, a covered entrance porch supported by four columns. The building reached a total of fifty-nine rooms as part of Móric Sándor’s nineteenth-century transformation of the earlier manor.
Rooms and decoration
The ground floor contained a billiard room, dining room, smoking room, conservatory, house chapel, and card room. On the first floor were the count’s and countess’s bedrooms, a living room, and a library. Alessandro Sanquirico, an Italian architect and designer from Milan, created the interiors in sky blue and white, with decoration drawing on Etruscan and Pompeian art and the work of Raphael. Maria Piazza produced the inlaid stucco. Paintings of members of the Sándor family, antlers, hunting trophies, and gilded mirrors decorated the walls. London-made furniture and wrought-iron elements produced by Viennese craftsmen completed the interiors.
Garden and estate buildings
English landscape garden
The former game garden was redesigned as a thirty-acre English landscape garden, a park arranged with naturalistic lawns, plantings, and views rather than a strictly geometric plan. The grounds included a palmhouse. Wartime and postwar use left the gardens and park overgrown before the restoration renewed the wider property.
Stables
The estate included stables for Móric Sándor’s celebrated horses. A local tradition says that he once jumped from the palace balcony on horseback as part of a bet.
