Castle of Diósgyőr

A castle probably stood at Diósgyőr from the 12th century, but it was destroyed in the Mongol invasion of 1241–42. Once the Mongols withdrew, King Béla IV ordered a castle raised on every hilltop in the kingdom, and the Gothic castle that stands today was probably built on his initiative by Ernye bán of the Ákos kindred: an oval structure with a round keep and a polygonal outer wall. A 1316 record calling it the "new castle" confirms that it replaced an earlier fortification, and a 1330 tax list shows the surrounding town among the wealthier in the county.

Diósgyőr reached its height under King Louis the Great (1342–1382), who rebuilt and modernised it as a stop on the road to Poland, whose crown he inherited in 1370. The rebuilt castle stood within a rectangular courtyard with a tower at each corner and a four-metre moat, and its Knights' Hall ran 25 metres long; the work was finished under his daughter Mary. In 1381 Louis used the castle to ratify the Peace of Turin, under which Venice agreed to raise the Angevin flag over St Mark's Square every Sunday.

After the personal union between Hungary and Poland ended at Louis's death, Diósgyőr lost strategic importance and for the next two centuries served as a wedding gift and holiday residence for the queens of Hungary. The last to hold it, Maria, wife of Louis II, formally gave it up in 1546, by which time it had already been occupied by the ruling prince of Transylvania.

As the Ottomans advanced through southern Hungary, its owners, the Gyarmati Balassa family, tried to turn the residence into a proper fortress, replacing its slender turrets with strong bastions and adding an Italian-style rondelle to the north-western tower — the last major rebuilding the castle ever received. Ottoman forces took the castle in 1598, in the campaign that also broke the Christian army at Mezőkeresztes, though it was soon recovered; a poorly paid garrison and crumbling walls nonetheless held off a Turkish siege in 1650. Fire gutted the roof in 1673, leaving the castle barely habitable, and by the century's end it had lost all military value.

Scientific excavation began in the 1930s, but restoration proper started only in 1953, at first confined to the sections at risk of collapse, with systematic archaeological work following from 1960. A far larger restoration, costed at 2.7 billion forints, rebuilt most of the complex to two storeys in 2014; its rooms were furnished in medieval style and the castle reopened on 30 August 2014. The south-western tower, damaged long before by a lightning strike, was left in ruin, since its broken profile had itself become part of the castle's character.

Diósgyőr is now part of Miskolc, into which it was formally absorbed on 1 January 1945. Once reopened, the restored castle hosted the twice-yearly Diósgyőr Castle Plays and one of Central Europe's largest waxworks exhibitions, its scenes depicting everyday medieval life, jousting tournaments and a medieval market.

A second restoration phase, intended to return the whole castle — palace wings, towers, roofs, outer bailey and moat — to its appearance under Louis the Great, began in 2021 and closed the site to visitors. Original plans set completion for 2020, but the project ran into unforeseen problems with the stability of the walls and into political and funding disputes, leaving the reconstruction unfinished; where the first restoration phase drew wide praise, reception of the stalled second phase has been far more divided.