Royal Palace Courtyard
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Transcript
The palace began not as a royal residence but as the great estate centre of Antal Grassalkovich the First, one of the most successful magnates of eighteenth-century Hungary. Construction began around the 1730s and expanded in stages.
Its U-shaped courtyards and long wings were designed to organise household, administration, ceremony and estate management. Grassalkovich’s rise depended on Habsburg service and landholding after the Ottoman wars, so the palace expresses a new elite consolidating wealth in a recovering kingdom. Before Sisi ever arrived, Gödöllő was already a political and economic statement.