A little book of castles

Step into the world of aristocrats and uncover curious stories hidden along the way.

The challenge

Heritage is not meant to be silent. It is a living design, shaped by time, memory, and imagination. Across Europe, traces of the past rise from memorials, castles, and ancient ruins; each a crafted expression of culture, each one a story waiting to be retold. This is not about preserving relics behind glass; it is about reactivating them as part of our present. Working as a museologist, I saw this tension up close: institutions sitting on centuries of extraordinary material, yet struggling to make people genuinely care. The problem was not the stories. It was how they were being told.

The observation

Drama has always been in season

Hungary's history has always been in motion, marked by turbulence, resilience, and reinvention. Aristocrats once built and inhabited castles and palaces not only as symbols of power, but as stages where human stories unfolded. Their choices, passions, and contradictions reveal the full spectrum of humanity: moments of frailty alongside acts of greatness.

Then I started finding the gossip. Andrássy's affair with the queen. Warlords with debts. Scandals behind closed palace doors. And it hit me: we are already living these dramas. We watch them every night on reality TV. The only difference is the costume. Heritage communication presents monuments; but they were messy, fascinating people, and that is exactly what makes them compelling.

The internet had already figured this out. Old painting memes (a Renaissance portrait captioned with a modern punchlin) went massively viral precisely because of this gap between the formality of the image and the relatability of the feeling. My project was trying to do something adjacent, but with editorial depth.

The solution

The cultural heritage is in da house

If the stories were already there, the design challenge was about framing. How do you take dusty history and give it the energy of a group chat? The answer was tone: ironic, warm, a little irreverent. Serious enough to honour the subject, light enough to make it enjoyable.

A Little Book of Castles is a self-initiated concept for a publication that pairs Hungarian castles with the rumours and scandals that once circulated within their walls. Each castle gets a minimal portrait: a brief history, key facts, and then the punchline: the gossip. The visual identity mirrors the editorial concept, refined enough to signal cultural credibility, but with enough wit to signal this is not a textbook.

The format

A Tumblr and a book walk into a castle

The concept lives across two formats. A Tumblr-based website built for scrolling and sharing — each castle a self-contained post, digestible and designed to travel. And a physical book, for those who want to sit with it. Together they reflect how heritage could actually reach people: through the platforms and habits they already have, not the ones institutions wish they used.