What Spitzer Castle looked like: a reconstruction and 3D model

Today Spitzer Castle is a ruin with broken windows, a leaking roof and graffiti (photo album). Here we have tried to picture it as the Spitzers saw it around 1900. The history of the castle and the films shot there are on a separate page.

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Arcade front Turul side Winter garden From above Turul Rotate

What is known

• Built in 1892–1898 for Eduard Spitzer, a co-owner of the Beočin cement works (Municipality of Beočin). The design is attributed to Imre Steindl, the architect of the Hungarian Parliament, but this has not been confirmed by documents (Radosavljević, FTN Novi Sad).
• An asymmetric building on four levels: basement, ground floor, first floor and attic. The main entrance faces north, and there may have been two main entrances on that front. It led into a double-height hall with a gallery and a decorated balustrade, and large openings led from the hall into a tall glass winter garden (FTN).
• Cement instead of stone. The walls are built with Beočin cement, gravel and stone from the Danube, the facade ornaments are ready-made castings from the cement works, and the facades are rendered with cement mortar (FTN). The white “stone blocks” in the photographs are therefore most likely cement as well.
• A mix of styles: Romanesque-Gothic arches, triple windows, oculi, Renaissance arcades and Baroque lines, influenced by the Hungarian Secession (FTN).
• Inside: a green Zsolnay ceramic fireplace, wooden panelling and walls painted with plant ornaments (FTN), stained-glass windows (Magyar Szó), a lion’s head spouting water over the bathtub (Magyar Szó) and bathroom tiles with floral motifs (kastelyok.com).
• The turul, the mythical bird of the Hungarians, has stood on the gable since 1898 (Magyar Szó).
• The park had large plane trees (Magyar Szó) and fountains; old residents remember deer, roe deer and peacocks (Vojvodina Travel).
• The roof was a timber structure covered with tiles (FTN); the tiles were relaid in 2004 (kastelyok.com). Today part of the roof is covered with corrugated sheeting, as the photographs show.

What we had to guess

• The plans in the FTN paper show the house as it is now, drawn for an adaptation project, so later changes may be in them. We read the plans and the elevation at a common scale (walls 46–56 cm thick, as the paper gives them), so measurements can be half a metre out. The elevation shows only the north front; the other sides are drawn from photographs.
• The roofs over the parts not seen in the elevation (the back and the winter garden’s far end) are simplified.
• The winter garden: according to the plans it is a single-storey wing, narrower than the house, with a bay at its far end. The elevation shows a tiled roof with cresting, not a glass one; we follow it. A small room built on to its far end, probably in socialist times, is left out.
• The colours of the stained glass, the window bars, the fountain in front of the facade and the trees are there to make the picture readable.
• Magyar Szó writes that the turul faces north towards the Danube, but in the photographs it stands above the west end wall, opposite the winter garden, with a corner loggia with two columns beside it; kastelyok.com also places it on the western facade (kastelyok.com). The model follows the photographs.

Old photographs and drawings

So far we have not found old photographs of the castle that we are free to publish. What we did find:

• The postcard collection of the Zemplén Museum in Szerencs (Hungary) holds pre-1945 cards titled “Beocsin” (Hungaricana). They may only be published with the museum’s permission, and we have not yet checked whether the castle is on them.
• The documentation of the castle is kept by the Provincial Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments in Petrovaradin, and the castle has a chapter in Branka Kulić’s book Dvorci i letnjikovci Vojvodine (2012) (FTN).

If you have old photographs of the castle, its park or the gazebo at home, please send them to us: with your permission we will show them here with your name.

Sources

• Olivera Radosavljević: Revitalizacija dvorca porodice Špicer, Zbornik radova FTN, Novi Sad (Serbian)
• Dvorci Srbije: Špicerov dvorac, with the facade drawing (Serbian)
• Magyar Szó: A turul nem repült el (Hungarian)
• kastelyok.com: Spitzer-kastély, Belcsény (Hungarian)
• Municipality of Beočin: Špicerov dvorac (Serbian)
• Vojvodina Travel: Dvorac Špicerovih (Serbian)