Monastery

Located on the King’s Estate between the Cserhát and Mátra mountains, on the riverbank of Zagyva, Pásztó Abbey dedicated to St. Michael was founded around 1100 and was an important ecclesiastic center of the region in the Middle Ages.

In the twelfth century the abbey, originally Benedictine, was known for its glass production. In 1191, King Béla III gave the abbey to the Cistercian Order. In the thirteenth century the abbey went under private patronage and it became the burial place of the Rátold kindred, a local noble family.  The abbey was destroyed by the Turks in the sixteenth century and partly rebuilt as a manorial centre of the Cistercian Order in the 1650s.  Today visitors can visit the ruins of the medieval monastery near the Baroque monastic building which has been transformed into the town museum.