He wrote to his friend, Frigyes Kerényi his No.XIII travel letter. After March 15, 1848, the laborers opened the casemates of the castle prison and released the prisoners. To commemorate this, a linden tree was planted in the semi-circular bastion of the Upper Castle, which was later named the Tree of Freedom, but the tree grew too tall and was devastated by a storm on July 21, 1960. On April 22, 1849, the castle's defenders struck the imperial troops under the leadership of Pál Mezőssy, castle captain, at the Latorca bridge in Podhering. In 1901, an obelisk was set up at the scene of the winning battle. When Nicholas I, Russian Tsar, came to help the Austrian emperor, defenders of the Munkács Castle (32 officers and 1329 public soldiers) were forced to give up on August 26, 1849. On July 1, 1855, upon the decree of Emperor Franz Joseph I, the castle was again converted into a prison, and many soldiers of the War of Independence lived their cells. In 1857–1859, transformations were made in the castle. The prisoners were also involved in the work. In October 1896, on the occasion of the millennium celebrations, the Hungarian Ministry of Justice terminated the operation of the prison, and the prisoners were transferred to other institutions. The castle was bought by the Ministry of Finance for 393,859 crowns and was entrusted by the Bereg County Treasury. However, there was not enough money to do so, so it began to decay. In 1896, at the millennium of the Hungarian conquest of the Carpathian Basin a monument was raised in the castle. On the top of the monument was a large turul, the mythological bird of the Hungarians. In 1924 the statue and monument were removed by the Czechoslovakian authorities. Since 1939, when Carpathian Ruthenia was temporarily part of Hungary, the statue was re-erected. In 1945 the occupying Soviet Red Army melted down the statue to make red stars. In 2008 the turul statue was again re-erected at an inauguration ceremony by Zoltán Lengyel, acting mayor of Mukachevo. After World War I, when Transcarpathia was annexed to Czechoslovakia under the Treaty of Trianon, the castle was first used by the Czechoslovak army (1919-1938), and then by the barracks of the Royal Hungarian Army 1939-1944.