Sárvár
Encyclopedia
Hungary
Hungary , officially the Republic of Hungary , is a landlocked country in Central Europe. It is situated in the Carpathian Basin and is bordered by Slovakia to the north, Ukraine and Romania to the east, Serbia and Croatia to the south, Slovenia to the southwest and Austria to the west. The...
in Vas.
Etymology
Sár means "mud" in HungarianHungarian language
Hungarian is a Uralic language, part of the Ugric group. With some 14 million speakers, it is one of the most widely spoken non-Indo-European languages in Europe....
, and vár means "castle". The latter is a common ending for settlement names.
Notability
The population of the town lying on the banks of the River Rába at Kemeneshát is nearly 16,000. The town has become a tourist centre of international renown. Through the Nádasdy family the castle played a significant role in the progress of Hungarian culture in the 16th and 17th centuries. The first Hungarian book, The New Testament (1541), was printed here. The knight's hall of the castle is decorated with the battle scenes of Lord Chief Justice Ferenc Nádasdy (married to the notorious Elizabeth BathoryElizabeth Báthory
Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed was a countess from the renowned Báthory family of Hungarian nobility. Although in modern times she has been labelled the most prolific serial killer in history, the number of murders has been debated...
) and scenes from the Old Testament. A number of rarities of cultural remains are shown in the exhibition halls of the Ferenc Nádasdy Museum.
The most outstanding sights include: the arboretum (a nature reserve), the neo-Classical Lutheran church and the Roman Catholic church, the park forest and the Csónakázó (= Rowing) Lake. A new Thermal and Wellness bath of European standard was opened in 2002 awaiting visitors in pleasant surroundings.
Sárvár's notable sights include the spa
Thermal bath
A thermal bath is a warm body of water. It is often referred to as a spa, which is traditionally used to mean a place where the water is believed to have special health-giving properties, though note that many spas offer cold water or mineral water treatments.A thermal bath may be part of a...
(with its famous medicinal water), Nádasdy Castle, a Baroque
Baroque architecture
Baroque architecture is a term used to describe the building style of the Baroque era, begun in late sixteenth century Italy, that took the Roman vocabulary of Renaissance architecture and used it in a new rhetorical and theatrical fashion, often to express the triumph of the Catholic Church and...
church, and an arboretum
Arboretum
An arboretum in a narrow sense is a collection of trees only. Related collections include a fruticetum , and a viticetum, a collection of vines. More commonly, today, an arboretum is a botanical garden containing living collections of woody plants intended at least partly for scientific study...
.
In 1564 András Beythe (botanist) was born in Sárvár.
During the Second World War the town was one of the centres of internment for Polish soldiers who had arrived in Hungary in 1939.
British avian flu outbreak
The Bernard Matthews Sága Foods plant in Sárvár, that processes turkeyTurkey
Turkey , known officially as the Republic of Turkey , is a Eurasian country located in Western Asia and in East Thrace in Southeastern Europe...
s, has been implicated in the H5N1
H5N1
Influenza A virus subtype H5N1, also known as "bird flu", A or simply H5N1, is a subtype of the influenza A virus which can cause illness in humans and many other animal species...
outbreak in Suffolk
Suffolk
Suffolk is a non-metropolitan county of historic origin in East Anglia, England. It has borders with Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south. The North Sea lies to the east...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
.