Conacul Nako

Nakó Castle, located in the center of Sânnicolau Mare, was built in 1864 by Count Kálmán Nakó, in the neoclassical style, following the plans of the architect Miklós Ybl. A park with trees of rare species was laid out around the castle.

The name Nakó is the Hungarian version of the name Nacu. Nacu comes from a family of Aromanians who came from Greece and settled in Banat. The two brothers, Hristu and Chiril Nacu, who were members of the most famous noble family in the northwest of Timiș-Torontal county in the 18th-19th centuries, known as the Nacu count family, converted to Catholicism and became Hungarian, adopting the names of Nakó, Kristóf and Cziril respectively.

The Nacu brothers purchased the Sânnicolau estate in an auction in 1781, and in 1864 the construction of the castle began on this land. The building, which is protected by a tower built in medieval style, has 99 rooms. In its heyday, the castle housed a library of 5,000 books, paintings, statues, carved furniture, rare porcelains and letters from figures such as Ferenc Deák, Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner.

The treasures in the castle of the Nako counts disappeared immediately after the First World War, when the Banat was, for a short period, occupied by the Serbs, and later by the French. After the First World War, the first agricultural school in Romania was established in the castle, and in 1941 it became the headquarters of a legionary organization, being later transformed into a barracks-storage for weapons. After the Second World War, in the period 1949-1951, the castle housed a school for tractor drivers, and between 1953-1955 it functioned as an agricultural school.

In 1975, the Sânnicolau Mare Town Hall opened the "Béla Bartók" Museum in the castle, which was inaugurated in 1981. In the 1980s, the castle also housed the House of Pioneers. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, the castle was transformed into a disco and a computer club Later, the castle was transformed into the House of Culture and the city museum.