Taródi castle Sopron, European Picnic, Fertőrákos Reminiscent of the past, Lake Ferto Hungary

Taródi castle, Sopron - Hungary
Perhaps the most special attraction of Sopron is the Taród Castle, also called Fool's Castle and Owl Castle. For the most part, it is the 50-year work of one single man, István Taródi, who used 150-200 railway cars of stones and bricks in the course of the construction until his death in 2010.
Already as a teenager, István Taródi was dreaming of building a castle. He started with building a wooden castle on his parents' plot. His real dream came true on 1 May 1951, when he bought a plot of land on the Nándor Hill at the top of the Lőverek in Sopron and moved the wooden castle there. He placed a stuffed owl on one of the balcony-supporting beams, after which the locals named the strange building Owl Castle. He began the construction of the 4,000-square-metre stone castle that you can see today in 1959.
He worked as a painter and after his working hours he obsessively devoted all his free time and a significant part of his earnings to build the castle. For this reason, the locals considered him an eccentric, hence the name Fool's Castle.
You can enter the castle over a 3-meter-deep moat through the drawbridge and find everything that is typical of a medieval knight's castle: the living area, the well, the knight's hall, the wine house, the drawbridge, the spiral stairs as well as the castle bath.

Pan-European Picnic, Fertőrákos
The Pan-European Picnic (German: Paneuropäisches Picknick; Hungarian: páneurópai piknik; Slovak: Paneurópsky piknik) was a peace demonstration held on the Austrian-Hungarian border near Sopron, Hungary on 19 August 1989. The opening of the border gate between Austria and Hungary at the Pan-European Picnic was an event in the chain reaction, at the end of which Germany reunified, the Iron Curtain fell apart, and the Eastern Bloc disintegrated. The communist governments and the Warsaw Pact subsequently dissolved, ending the Cold War. As a result, this dissolution also led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Lake Ferto Biosphere Reserve, Hungary
Lake Fertő Biosphere Reserve – like most other Hungarian biosphere reserves – is a typical "first generation" biosphere reserve, designated mainly for the conservational purpose. Setting up the Lake Fertő Biosphere Reserve far preceded the organizing of the Lake Fertő National Park (later extended to: Fertő-Hanság National Park covering the whole Fertő-Hanság wetland basin) and served as the main issue of nature conservation near and behind the iron curtain.

The area behind the iron curtain was a nearly abandoned territory, a no man’s land between Hungary and Austria. It was completely intact for nearly 40 years, entered only by border guards and very few civilians with specific licenses to do works with reed management, some fishing, hunting and – exceptionally – birdwatching or other research.