"Palace of Counts Schönborn" Carpathians

In the small village of Karpaty in Zakarpattia, there is a fairy-tale Schönborn Castle. Every year, thousands of tourists come here to the Mukachevo region to see the palace, which seems to have stepped off the pages of knightly novels. Count Schönborn-Buchheim built the Schönborn Castle in the village of Karpaty from 1890 to 1895. Initially, a wooden summer residence of this famous family stood on the site of the modern castle, and half a century later a majestic palace in the Neo-Romantic style was built.

The castle was built using an astronomical structure that was popular at the time. The number of windows corresponded to the number of days in a year, the number of rooms was equal to the number of weeks, and the twelve exits from the castle symbolized twelve months.

The windows and doors were decorated with skillful stained glass windows based on biblical stories. There were four towers above the palace that differed in shape and size. Each tower was crowned with a weather vane.

Nowadays, the castle territory is surrounded by a magnificent garden, laid out in the middle of the 19th century. The real decoration of the garden is a small lake, the outlines of which reproduce the map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire of that time. Today, the garden features rare varieties of ornamental trees: boxwood, Canadian spruce, catalpa, Weymouth pine, sakura, which Count Schönborn brought here with him, and pink beech.

During the Soviet period, the Schönborn Palace was used as a sanatorium.

• In the depths of the garden is the so-called "Spring of Beauty". According to legend, if you wash your face with its water, you will not age for a long time.
• According to another legend, one of the counts of Schönborn was a terrible jealous man. He suspected that his wife was cheating on him. One day, the count met a fortune-teller in the local forest who told him how to test his wife: if she came down from the Falcon Rocks unharmed, she would remain faithful to her husband. The countess easily descended the steep cliffs and later left Count Schönborn, who had so easily put her life at risk. Rumor has it that after the Countess's death, her ghost, a lady in black, began to appear in Schönborn Castle.
• Schönborn Castle was once favored by Hermann Göring, the Reich Air Minister of the Third Reich. There were even negotiations with the owner of the castle about its purchase, as well as with the government of Carpathian Ukraine represented by Augustin Voloshyn. However, the sale of the castle was denied.

Schönborn Castle is located in the village of Karpaty, Mukachevo district. Trains from Kyiv, Uzhhorod, Lviv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Mukachevo stop at the railway station of the same name. The village of Karpaty is located on the Kyiv-Chop highway, and the sanatorium itself is situated between the villages of Suskovo and Chynadiyovo. The latter village is home to another pearl of Zakarpattia - St. Miklos Castle.