The church of the Blessed Virgin – The Saint Adrian Benedictine monastery – Border fortress against the Turkish invaders

On 24 January A.D. 850, Liupram, the archbishop of Salzburg anointed Privina’s private church in honour of Virgin Mary, which was located within his manor (munimen) fortified with a wide, deep moat and defensive earthwork. The most prominent representatives of the Bavarian secular and ecclesiastical aristocracy, as well as of a province called Orient that was situated in the eastern Alps region paid a visit on this outstanding occasion.

The church was re-anointed A.D. 1019, and Saint Adrian became its patron. Having used the remains of Privina’s manor house, a Benedictine monastery was built adjacently. Two of its monks assisted the missionary work of Bishop Gellért (Saint Gerard Sagredo) in the southern region of the Great Hungarian Plain. Commencing the second half of the 13th century, the monastery officiated as a facility entrusted with notarial functions to record the affairs of the landowners residing in the neighbourhood. The conflagration of 1341 in the sacristy damaged the archives of the monastery and annihilated the earliest documents of the church. The Turkish menace forced the monks to flee to Vasvár in 1575. At that time, the buildings were also in a very poor condition. The benefice of Zalavár was endowed with the abbacy of Göttweig in Lower Austria in 1715, and the new monastery was subsequently erected in Zalaapáti in the 1770s.

The late medievalcluster of buildings that had been exploded in 1702 is depicted on the drawing of military engineer Guilio Turco, which he produced in 1569. The road network of the vicinity was constructed by the utilization of stone blocks collected from its remnants in the 19th century. Regretfully, a sand mine was opened in this area later. The marred sites of nature remain nowadays hidden in the forest stretching in front of us.

Only Turco’s drawing incorporates specific information on the plan and the measures of the archaic church, of which location could have been determined by the burials of a cemetery around it dating to the 9th century and the Árpádian Age. The fragments of the church’s rood screen dating to the 11th century, of which decoration is similar to St. Stephen’s sarcophagus, were collected in the neighbouring villages. The church and the monastery were surrounded by a defence wall at the end of the 11th century. A portal and the fragments of a spout witness the construction works taking place in the 1230s. A defence wall, which comprised four corner towers and enclosed a smaller area contrary to earlier times, was built around the buildings in the 15th century. There was a moat in front of it. The wood&earthwork structured external defence of the fortified monastery, which was surrounded by another moat, was finished in the 16th century. The filling of this moat contained a large amount of artefacts that have given evidence of the everyday life in the fortress.

The ruins of Vársziget were abandoned and a new abbey was erected at Zalaapáti between 1753-1784.