Crow Farm, Sztána

On the slope above Varjúvár, a detached studio-farmstead was built in the mid-1930s. Its organic development began with a small, independent lookout tower, erected by the architect in the mid-1920s. The tower, known as the “Kula,” directly references the small fortified Ottoman towers of the same name. The ensemble was originally organized around a small inner courtyard and included a studio, servants’ quarters, and a stable for the architect’s preferred means of transport—horses. Over time, the complex was expanded with additional outbuildings, gardens, and orchards, gradually transforming it into a fully functioning farmstead. The farm was destroyed in 1944, although its ruins remain visible to this day. This site functioned as the centre of Kós Károly’s farm in Sztána, and it was here that he relocated his study from the Varjúvár below.

According to Kós András, the tower was built first, around 1928, and was called the Kula (with a lookout above and an open hearth below). In 1944 it was almost completely destroyed. The livestock was driven to surrounding villages, and the buildings were devastated. In 1955, László Debreczeni surveyed the site; at that time, portions of the walls were still standing.

Excerpt from Dr. Károly Kós’s text The Sztána Holiday Settlement:

“Károly Kós’s farmstead, the Varjú Farm, lies approximately 500 metres from the aforementioned buildings (Varjúvár, the Szentimrei Villa [ed.]), at the boundary of the village of Nádas, on the rocky slope of Dămbu Crucii. It was built on a small plot gradually acquired piece by piece, officially classified as largely infertile, though partly planted with fruit trees, on a terraced hillside with fine views toward the Faggyas Valley, the Riszeg ridge, and the distant Meszes Mountains.

On this site once stood a small wattle-and-daub hut. In its place, around 1930, my father built a stone lookout tower inspired by Turkish kula towers, and a few years later added two living rooms in continuation—one for himself and one for his farmhand. At right angles to these he added a stable, and further away a cart shed, enclosing a courtyard in between, much like the Alpine farmsteads (‘ocol întărit’) he had seen during his summer horseback excursions in the Carpathians.

In the early 1940s—except when obliged by weekly duties in Cluj, for example as professor of agricultural architecture at the Agricultural Institute—my father ‘summered’ here from spring to autumn, descending to the house only for meals. Here he designed, wrote, and managed the farm with a resident family of servants and well-paid day labourers from Nádas, as by then we, his sons, had little time to spend at home during holidays or working on the land.

In the autumn of 1944, everything that his servant (Boboș Simion) could not save from the guards was destroyed; within a few years, scarcely any trace of the farmstead remained. This was the shortest-lived building of the holiday settlement.”