Szente-Öcsi József / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0)The Horse of Firtos
A tale of a fairy maiden’s secret love and the horse turned to stone after a fall into the ravine.
🔈Audio narration coming soon - listen to the legend here
Tradition holds that a fairy maiden living in Firtos Castle secretly fell in love with a mortal young man. Night after night they met in stolen hours, along a narrow path where the mountainside suddenly falls away into a ravine. On one such night ride, the young man’s horse lost its footing on the narrow trail, and horse and rider were pulled together into the abyss. To leave an eternal memory of that love and of the moment it ended, the fairies turned the horse to stone exactly where it fell. Locals say the stone’s colour still shifts with the seasons and the weather - darker before rain, paler in clear skies - as if the mountain itself were forecasting the next day. The rock said to hold the faithful horse’s shape can still be pointed out along the path today, and for anyone setting out across the plateau on horseback, it is the first greeting from the old story.
Tartod Castle
The rivalry between Firtos and the wicked Tartod, ending with a castle swallowed by the earth.
🔈Audio narration coming soon - listen to the legend here
Legend says that after the great flood, two fairy sisters, Firtos and Tartod, chose the peak rising above the plateau as their home. Firtos was beautiful and kind-hearted, and her fellow fairies soon chose her as their queen; seeing this, her sister Tartod, wicked and cunning by nature, was consumed by envy. When Firtos decided to build a castle, her fairies raised its walls in a single night, and in their joy lit fires and danced beneath the finished stones. Seeing this, Tartod swore she would raise an even finer castle before the cock crowed - and that she would steal the cornerstone of Firtos’s castle for her own. At midnight, with her wicked fairies, she tore into Firtos’s unfinished wall, ripped out the cornerstone, and drove an iron rod through it to carry it away. But as the load passed over Korond, a rooster crowed, signalling the end of the night and the end of the fairies’ power. The iron rod snapped in two, the stone fell, and Tartod’s oath collapsed with it: her half-built castle sank into the earth in that same instant. Only its ruins remain today, hidden deep in the forest - silent witness that ill intent, even backed by fairy power, cannot reach its goal.
Likaskő
The stolen, fallen cornerstone that became a pierced gate of luck and healing.
🔈Audio narration coming soon - listen to the legend here
Tradition holds that Likaskő is none other than the stone that Tartod’s wicked fairies stole from her sister Firtos, meaning to build it into the foundation of their own castle. They drove an iron rod through it to lift it, and were already flying over Korond when a rooster crowed, marking the end of midnight. In that instant the spell broke: the iron rod snapped, the desecrated cornerstone fell, and it has lain there ever since, still pierced by the hole the rod left behind. Tradition says that whoever passes through that opening with a pure heart is granted health and luck by the stone - as if the fairies’ ill will had finally turned to good - while the stone proves too narrow for anyone who carries bad intent. In the old days, locals would bring the sick and the newly-wed here on the first days of spring, so that passing through the stone would give them new strength. Even today, many stop here for a moment before continuing along the plateau’s paths.
