Archbishop's Garden

The garden belonging to the Archbishop's Palace of Kalocsa was begun in the 1790s by Archbishop László Kollonich on a muddy, waterlogged, shrubby area much lower than the ground level of the building.

In front of the U-shaped castle and in the inner courtyard there is a symmetrical Baroque garden. The park in the deeper rear area was probably initially a French garden, as attested by a French garden plan by Gáspár Oszvald, the Piarist director of the Episcopal manor of Vác, preserved in the archives of the Archdiocese, and gradually transformed into an English garden.

The fate of the garden was particularly close to the heart of Cardinal Lajos Haynald, Archbishop of Kalocsa (1867-1891), who, as a botanist, was also the head of the Natural Sciences Committee of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Around 1930, the rear part of the park was divided in two by a two-metre-high fence and opened to the public, providing a pleasant place for walking and recreation.