Count László Károlyi, who has died aged 95, was among the last surviving representatives of the old Hungarian aristocracy whose world was swept away by war and Communism. Yet he lived long enough to reside once more in the ancestral castle from which his family had fled ahead of the advancing Soviet army in 1944.
Born into one of Hungary’s oldest and most powerful noble houses, Károlyi belonged to a dynasty that originated in the twelfth century, shaped the country’s political life for generations, yet embodied the deep ideological divisions of modern Hungarian history. The family produced conservative magnates, Habsburg loyalists and left-wing firebrands.
It produced Count Mihály Károlyi, the radical democrat who briefly led Hungary in a short-lived administration after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, and his wife, Countess Katinka, née Andrássy, who became famous throughout Europe as the “Red Countess” for her left-wing views.
A Childhood Swept Away by War
László Károlyi was born on 29 June 1931 at the family castle in Fót, twenty kilometres northeast of Budapest, the son of Count István Károlyi and Princess Mária Magdolna Windisch-Graetz. He spent much of his childhood between Fót and the family’s other great house, Füzérradvány, in the Zemplén hills in northeastern Hungary. He grew up in the last years of a world that still retained something of imperial Central Europe, with landed estates, servants, formal dinners, hunting, shooting and a society which looked as naturally towards Vienna and London as it did towards Budapest.
It was the world Count Miklós Bánffy depicted in his Transylvanian Trilogy, with its elegance and melancholy, and the fatal political blindness of the old Hungarian magnates. Bánffy and the Károlyis were related, and the novels’ evocation of dancing, hunting and intriguing as the ground shifted beneath that world might almost have served as a prelude to László Károlyi’s own childhood.
That world ended violently. In 1944, aged 13, as Soviet troops advanced into Hungary, Károlyi left the country alone and made his way to his uncle, Prince Lajos Windisch-Graetz, in the Sudetenland. His mother and siblings followed some six months later, and the family escaped to Bavaria. Károlyi and his younger brother were subsequently sent to school in St Gallen, Switzerland, while their family attempted to salvage what remained of their property in Hungary. Under the Communist regime, the estates were nationalised and the old aristocratic order abolished.
Building a Life in Exile
After leaving school, Károlyi emigrated to Argentina, where his Windisch-Graetz uncle had settled after the war. A Hungarian title was of little use in Buenos Aires, so he worked as a labourer by day, carrying cement bags and bricks, while learning Spanish in the evenings. After two years he moved to Chile and then Peru, where he bought land in the Upper Amazon jungle and established a coffee plantation. He also grew rubber, bananas and pepper. The enterprise prospered for 15 years, but when world coffee prices began to fall, he sold up.
Horses provided one continuity with his childhood. He first rode at Fót at the age of three and remembered the hunters kept in stables close to the castle for hunt meets. In Argentina he rode polo ponies, and when he later settled in England, he returned seriously to equestrian sport, competing in eventing. His greatest equestrian achievement was to ride at Burghley, one of the most demanding three-day events in the world. He also hunted, particularly during periods spent working in Africa.
In 1967, he settled in London, where his sister Borbála worked as a doctor. With a friend, he established a company representing British and American commercial interests in developing countries, work which took him around much of the world. London also restored him to the cosmopolitan Central European society in which he was naturally at ease.
His first wife was Nicole Brook-Shepherd, daughter of Gordon Brook-Shepherd, the Daily Telegraph’s distinguished former Vienna correspondent and historian, whose books chronicled the collapse of the Habsburg world and the fate of Central Europe under Soviet domination. Although the marriage was short-lived, the connection neatly reflected the émigré milieu in which Károlyi moved, among exiled nobility, diplomats, anti-Communist intellectuals and survivors of vanished dynasties who met in London gentlemen’s clubs and drawing rooms while still inhabiting the mental world of old Mitteleuropa.
His second marriage, in 1992, was to Erzsébet Kenyeres de Dálnok, who came from an old Hungarian noble family but had grown up abroad. They met in London, where she worked at the Austrian embassy. Károlyi had long said he wanted to marry a Hungarian woman, although Erzsébet, brought up outside Hungary, spoke little Hungarian at the time. She later learned the language and shared his determination to return home.
Homecoming Without Restitution
After the collapse of Communism, that seemingly improbable ambition became possible. Károlyi returned permanently to Hungary in 1994, and from 1995 he and Erzsébet lived at Fót. There was, however, a characteristically Central European irony. He had not recovered his ancestral home. The castle, nationalised after the war and used for decades as a children’s institution, remained in state hands. The count returned to the house where he had been born, renting a small part of it.
He and Erzsébet set about rescuing what they could. Furniture, pictures and family possessions dispersed after 1945 were tracked down in museum stores, at auctions and in unlikely corners of public institutions. Some were returned to their original setting, and the Károlyi arms were restored to the castle façade. They established a collection devoted to the house and family’s history, while the István Károlyi Foundation continued the family tradition of charitable work, particularly among disadvantaged children.
At Füzérradvány, where he spent childhood summers, Károlyi advised on the castle’s restoration, and his foundation raised funds to return original furniture and hunting trophies to the castle. The park and the Zemplén landscape remained particularly vivid memories of the life from which he had been abruptly separated.
An Inheritance Held in Trust
For all his attachment to his grand ancestry, Károlyi resisted the idea that inherited property existed simply for personal enjoyment. He regarded the family name and its surviving possessions as things held in trust. He and Erzsébet were made honorary citizens of Fót in 2011, and in 2020 he received the Knight’s Cross of the Hungarian Order of Merit. Late in life, he recorded his reminiscences in the aptly titled memoir We Never Give Up (2021).
Visitors to Fót encountered a courteous and courtly figure who seemed to belong to another age. Though marked by exile and dispossession, he was not publicly bitter. He remembered the vanished hunting country around Fót and the old trees of the castle park, but he also recalled with amusement the village women who, when he bicycled past as a boy, would call him in for a plate of túrós csusza, Hungarian cottage-cheese pasta.
He left Fót as a boy and returned half a century later, having been successively refugee, labourer, coffee planter, businessman and English country sportsman. In the end he found himself living once again in the castle where his life had begun, surrounded by fragments of the family inheritance that he and his countess had managed to gather back together.
Count László Károlyi had no children. He is survived by his wife, Erzsébet, Countess Károlyi.
Count László Károlyi de Nagykárolyi, born 29 June 1931, died 4 October 2026.
Dr Michael O’Sullivan
Historian | Biographer
