Owl's Nest

The name was an insult. In 1944 a Hungarian newspaper in Ungvár called this building the Bagolyvár — the owl castle — meaning it had sunk so far that only owls would move in. The jibe stuck. It crossed into Ukrainian as Sovyne Hnizdo, the Owl's Nest, and the city now prints it on the signage.

What it is attached to is not a castle but a warehouse: 78 metres of volcanic stone under a tiled roof, buttressed along the western side, with 1781 carved on the pediment and some 150 metres of barrel-vaulted cellars running underneath. It stands at vul. Ferenca Rakotsi 2, a few minutes below Castle Hill, and is protected as a monument of national significance.

A treasury granary, not a count's cellar

Guidebooks hand the building either to the Drugeth counts, who held Uzhhorod Castle for three centuries, or to Ferenc II Rákóczi, whose name the street carries. The drawings say otherwise. Plans dated 1778, kept in Hungary's national archives, show it commissioned as a royal treasury granary — imperial infrastructure rather than a nobleman's private cellar.

The layout followed the cargo. Liquids went on the lower level, beer and wine among them; the floor above took dry goods in sacks and barrels — grain above all, but also sheep's wool and lard. A small cellar sat under the treasurer's rooms by the gate. Nothing here was decorative: every wall answers to what had to be kept cool, dry and locked.

Volcanic stone and 150 metres of vaults

The walls are built from the volcanic stone the hills around Uzhhorod supply, and they are heavy enough to hold the chill through a Zakarpattian August. Three buttresses prop the western wing. The plan measures 78.4m by 35m across the projections, and the corner blocks read from the street as squat towers — which is why visitors keep calling it a fortress.

Go down and the scale changes. Barrel vaults spring from thick stone piers, the passages keep going, and the air is cold and smells of damp masonry. The courtyard above is wide and plain — which is exactly what a loading yard needed to be.

Hotel, ceramics school, winery

Uzhhorod's brewery, recorded in city documents as early as 1631, stood nearby and gets folded into this building's history constantly. They were separate operations. What is certain is that in 1889 the last brewery structures on the site were cleared, after which the granary began a century of improvised second careers: a hotel, then a ceramics school, then a school for carpenters.

The wine connection is younger than most people assume. In 1926 the Serednie wine council opened a winery and tasting room on the lower level, and it is from then — not from the 1780s — that the building's reputation as a wine cellar dates.

What happened here in 1944

In 1944 twenty-one members of two Uzhhorod families, the Sterns and the Mittelmanns, hid on the lower level of the building. They lasted about two weeks before they were found and taken to the ghetto. Uzhhorod's Jewish population was deported to Auschwitz that May and June.

Later the same year an air-raid shelter for five hundred people was fitted out in the cellars.

Wine festivals and a second life

The Soviet decades left it as storage, offices and then a ruin in slow motion. The rescue came through a cross-border project, Yaroslav–Uzhhorod, funded under the Poland–Belarus–Ukraine programme for 2007–2013; the Uzhhorod works cost around a million euros and finished in 2011.

That November the first Zakarpattian Beaujolais was held here, and the young wine festival has anchored the building's calendar ever since. It falls in mid-November: regional winemakers bring the year's new wine, the first barrel is ceremonially opened downtown at the corner of Korzo and vul. Avhustyna Voloshyna, and the drinking moves into the cellars. Christmas fairs and the city's Knyha-Fest book festival use the halls too.

Visiting

Since 2022 part of the complex has run as a humanitarian aid centre for people displaced by the war, alongside the cultural programme — worth knowing before you turn up expecting a museum. There are no permanent exhibits and no standing tour; the building is at its best when something is on inside it. Check the city's event listings and aim for a festival weekend.

Otherwise it is a short detour from Castle Hill and the open-air museum beside it. Walk into the courtyard, find the date on the pediment and the buttresses shouldering the west wall, and you have the measure of the place.