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Czech Castles The country that gave its castles back
As Czechs go to the polls, some are returning to the grand homes once confiscated from them. Never have the fortunes of great ancestral houses taken a more unexpected turn than in Czechoslovakia today. Over the past few weeks, dozens of castles, hundreds of hectares of surrounding farmland and large collections of paintings and furniture have been returned to their former, largely noble, owners. A few years ago, most of these would have as easily believed the sun would fall into the moon. Confiscation came in two waves. First in 1945-46 from German families and collaborators and second in 1948 from the rest. Not surprisingly, former Nazis are specifically excluded from the present restitution programme. In Bohemia and Moravia, the Czech half of the country, the national monument service estimates there are 2,500 castles and country seats, as well as about 500 smaller manor houses. Most had been handed over to a variety of institutions, homes for the elderly, for the mentally ill, for the military. One hundred and fifty of the houses had remained open to the public as show houses or as museums. Half of these are now being reclaimed. On May 11, I set out to explore East Bohemia with John Harris, the architectural historian, Kit Martin, the rescuer of great empty houses and the American garden historian Howard Adams. With us came Josef Stulc, the director of the Czech monument service. Surprises awaited at every turn. Our first stop was Letovice, a renaissance castle remodelled in the 1720s and 1820s. It stands on a crag above a valley, but the approach is lined with large concrete apartment blocks. The huge barns in the outer courtyard are used by local farming collectives. Finding a gap in the chain link fence around the castle, we were soon on the terrace, looking down on a large regency gothic stable. Inside there were signs of military use, and everywhere the debris of collapsed ceilings. But for all its pathetic abandon, Letovice had a good new roof. Faced with a vast number of empty castles and monuments, the Czechs have at least tried to make sure the roofs are sound. Only a few months before, parliament voted an extra two million crowns, just for the roofs of endangered monuments. Our next stop was Cerna Hora, which has a renaissance wing dated 1561 and handsome Italianate additions of the 1850s. Inside it proved to be a thriving old people's home. Residents sat outside in the courtyard enjoying the sun. Now came Lysice, boasting a garden pergola mighty enough for Olympus itself. Inside we found the upstairs gallery panelled with an extraordinary series of rifle targets. There was one for each year from 1800 to 1850, painted with scenes of local life and spattered with bullet holes. This house, as with others which will not be restituted, will probably be returned to the local village or town, which may keep it as a show house or put it up for sale. Last that day came Boskovice, beautifully remodelled in Empire style in the 1820s and newly returned to its owner, a count. The columned carriage hall is as chastely neo-classical as any in Paris or Berlin, and the furniture remains (``best Biedermeier pool table I've ever seen,'' Mr Howard said), but in perfect, too perfect, decorative order. Looking at a Victorian water colour of an upstairs bedroom, we noticed the ceiling was now on a different, simpler pattern. All was suddenly clear. Whole rooms had been completely renewed. ``The state property service which did such work was not interested in routine maintenance. They left the buildings to decay so there would be a bigger job to do in the end,'' Mr Stulc said. On to the renaissance castle at Pardubice, where a dreadful shock awaits. The castle is a heavily fortified precinct approached through a series of gateways and has the grey pallor of death. A structural engineer has decided it is unsafe and pressure-injected the rubble walls with cement, which oozes out in hideous dribbles. In the courtyard we find the huge painted timbers of the medieval hall neatly sawn into 6ft lengths. In the hall itself there is a new concrete floor and a new concrete ceiling. ``This is the most complete destruction possible short of demolishing the entire building,'' Mr Martin said. Enchantment returned at the next castle, Slatinany. The estate is home to a pure breed of carriage horses ``Kladrubians''. After walking through a luxuriant English park we find 50 mares and their foals grazing in an apple orchard. The 1898 stables are as grand as any in Leicestershire. Last stop of the day is Nove Hrady, a large rococo house begun in 1773, newly restituted to the Dobernin family. A radical overhaul has been under way for some time, but a large alsatian methodically doing the rounds of the scaffolding deters explorers. Thursday brings us first to the castle at Rychnov, restituted a week before to the Kolovrat family. On the edge of the town is the usual cluster of huge concrete apartment blocks with a slick modern factory right next door. ``Not a power station but a plant providing hot water and heating for the whole town,'' our guide says. The present head of the family had remained in Czechoslovakia until 1968, then settled in Austria, setting up, we were told, a successful fishing tackle business. Now he is master again of a vast butter yellow Schloss, largely built by Santini, the great baroque architect of Moravia. It is laid out around a courtyard 150ft sq, freshly painted in icing sugar white stucco. The roof has been well repaired, using old tiles. The new owners will re-open Rychnov to the public later this summer but will eventually live in another reclaimed family house nearby, Cernikovice, now a home for the mentally handicapped. The patients will be relocated in a former Czech army barracks. Institutions inhabiting these houses are allowed to stay on for up to ten years after the owners reclaim, but the owners can claim rent and possibly hasten departure. On the first floor we find a magnificent picture collection, rooms of full-length Elizabethan portraits, baroque religious pictures, and beautiful, if melancholy, canvasses of dead game. All the pictures have been expertly cleaned and appear in excellent condition. After lunch we set off to vast historic Castolovice to meet Diana Phipps, a Czech married to an Englishman, who now works for President Havel. ``I got the house back five days ago,'' she said. The contents of the state rooms largely remain. The shock had been to find that the family rooms had been entirely gutted for a never-completed film gallery. A 1900 library alone remained, evocatively filled with bright red bound volumes of Country Life and The Ladies Field. Beyond is an English park of extraordinary lushness and beauty, informally planted to frame a series of receding vistas. Here Mr Martin expounded his theory that pensions not paradors will be the saving of Czech castles. ``If you let a hotel in, or even a relais-chateau, it will take over the place. Hotels require a large number of staff and lose a fortune if empty for even a few months.'' Much better, he argued, a series of houses and castles, each with several smaller apartments and bedroom suites for tourists who would eat out in the local town. A number of owners will have to find new ways to make their homes earn their keep beyond opening them to the public; some have turned down the opportunity to reclaim because they could not afford repairs. Friday takes us north to the great monastery at Kuks. We stop off at Josefov, a remarkable military town dating from the Napoleonic wars, with barracks the size of government ministries. ``The Russians took it over in 1968 and built a huge wall across the middle to keep everyone out,'' says Paul, our new guide. Now the barracks are empty, leaving more space than ever existed in Liverpool and London Docks combined. Our next goal is Ratiborice, a pink Trianon overlooking lush water meadows. It was built for Metternich's mistress, Wilhelmina. The Empire interiors are filled with fresh flowers and vases of foliage. Close by is a farm court enclosed by magnificent barns. But here the re-roofing drive has gone awry. One range of weathered old tiles, many capable of re-use, have been replaced by concrete ones and the undulations of the roof entirely ironed out. Nove Mesto is just restituted to a Czech owner who is living in America. It stands at the lower edge of a large village square, with the best heraldic supporters I have seen, a pair of utterly life-like stone brown bears. We drive back in the blazing evening sun along country roads lined with apple trees in full bloom. ``But we cannot eat the apples; they're too polluted by the leaded petrol,'' Mr Stulc said. Saturday takes us into the green, open rolling country of Moravia. Our first castle is in the town of Moravska Trebova. The local council would like to lease it, we are told. The robust stonework of the courtyard recalls the Palais de Luxembourg in Paris. The plan of the courtyard is unusual, zig-zag but symmetrical. Mr Martin quickly comes up with a scheme for making the two end pavilions in to small, twin hotels. ``They both have secluded gardens tucked away on the far side where you could hide a swimming pool.'' A few miles on we chance on Vranova Lhota, a little Normandy-style manoir, in a country village. The Thurn und Taxis family, despairing of its condition, gave it to the village. It would make an enchanting family house. True, the village rubbish dump has grown up just beyond the garden wall, but it would be an easy job to shift it. Bousov, our next stop, is a stupendous sight, built in the 1890s by Eugene von Hapsburg, grandmaster of the Teutonic Knights. We hear the knights want it back, but so far are precluded by the legislation. The red-roofed castle is dominated by a central tower as large and thrusting as a Cape Canaveral rocket. Inside, it is pure Lohengrin, with gothic bedrooms for the knights, complete with hooded beds and high-backed wooden benches. The main rooms all have ornate tiled stoves, and built-in seats, the middle-class comforts of Switzerland rather than draughty aristocratic grandeur. The Knights' Hall has a richly crocketed and cusped wagon roof, and beyond is a throne room lined with seats like a chapter house, dominated by a vast gothic chandelier containing a figure of St George, the patron of the order. Going south, the villages become drabber with grey, flat-roofed concrete houses. Our goal is Namest na Hane, a rococo summer house in a circular garden, which steps straight out of an 18th-century pattern book of maisons de plaisance. In a wing, there are three sensational 18th-century state coaches, built for successive archbishops of Olomouc. To show the springing still works, the guide rocks the coach on its straps with a force sufficient to give most museum curators heart seizure. The coaches have not been restored or re-upholstered, but simply cleaned. Inside the house is painted throughout with blue and green rocaille. The upstairs rooms all have at least three doors, like a Mozart farce, for maids and paramours to slip in and out. Our last day takes us first to Zdechovice. A nearby power station puts an end to any dream of rural idyll, and we find the house recently vacated by the Russian army, the grounds concreted over for parking and huts. Yet the house is freshly painted with a business-like red metal roof. Suddenly, the local mayor appears. ``The Russians have given five million crowns in reparation,'' he explains. He wants it to become a hotel. ``We have a marketing video.'' Before we leave, he insists we see the Russian prison, two grim cells, one no wider than a bed. Our final goal is Kacina, the Ickworth of Bohemia. It is a vast snow white composition with an eight-column portico, extended by long colonnades. ``Best Palladian sprawl I've seen,'' Mr Adams said. Inside it is a jolt to find it entirely fitted out as a museum of agriculture. ``All the original furniture has recently been found, and can be put back,'' says Paul. As we walk round, our attention is engaged by the exhibits as much as the inlaid parquets and painted ceilings. There are tableaux as good as any in the Science Museum, delightful models of farm buildings, and endless curios, like the wooden baroque statue converted into a beehive with an entrance carved in its knee.
In a week, we have seen 30 houses out of 3,000. The restitution is amazing
but the question is whether in ten years the owners will be managing to keep
them going. Or will the Czech government, like the British, face the new
challenge of acquiring whole houses with their contents for the nation?
A surfeit of castles
How do you cope when you are handed back a vast, crumbling inheritance? Marcus Binney reports Three years ago William E. Lobkowicz returned to Prague to claim a vast inheritance. The claim is the largest by far which the new Czech government has had to handle, involving eight castles and family seats, a superb collection of art, with paintings by Canaletto, Rubens and Velasquez, a library of 70,000 volumes, 4,500 musical scores and librettos, and archives housed on shelves stretching for six kilometres. The Lobkowiczes return as patriots. Prince Max Lobkowicz was Czechoslovakian ambassador in London when Hitler marched into Prague in 1938 and remained in London throughout the war, representing the Czech government in exile. His family lost everything. The castles were seized and all the best paintings taken to Berlin. His return in 1945 was shortlived and he fled to America in the communist putsch of 1948. The task which the Lobkowiczes now face is heroic preservation's equivalent of scaling the north face of the Eiger. Before the second world war, vast landed estates and thriving businesses supported the family's castles and palace in Prague. Today the forests around the castles are heavily polluted and surrounding villages destroyed by mining. Though titles have not been used since Czechoslovakia became a republic after the first world war, the Lobkowiczes are royal princes of the Austrian Empire, a family famous in its history for patronage of Beethoven. The family is to set up a Lobkowicz Trust, focused on Roundnice Castle, a huge baroque schloss, contemporary in date and equal in size to Wren's Chelsea Hospital. When the communists turned it into a political school for the military police, the entire contents had to be moved out within two days. Books were thrown out of the windows. Anything left was destroyed. The librarian leapt from the castle and killed himself. Today Roundnice Castle is a military school of music, and will be handed over to the family in 1996, when the last pupil leaves. There are substantial parts of it which neither William nor his advisers have seen. The roofs appear to be in reasonable condition, but choked rainwater pipes in the corners of the courtyard have done serious damage. The Renaissance castle of Nelahozeves is in better condition with a good new roof and a permanent exhibition of choice paintings, furniture and armour. But substantial parts of the castle leased to a local art gallery will remain inaccessible until the end of the decade. So it is with some relief that William talks of Strehov. ``It's a ruin, but it's profitable. We get 50,000 visitors a year and there are four busy restaurants the castle is in all the German fairytale books, and was the inspiration for Wagner's Tannhauser.'' He explains his strategy. ``People expect dramatic changes but we will fix the problems only as our means allow. We have begun by hiring a castellan for each castle, as well as a handyman to do basic repairs. ``We are organising volunteer days when friends and supporters can come to help with the basic tasks of clearing out.'' William's two brothers are also closely involved in the project, though their task is to remain in America and keep earning money. His mother and sister, who run a decorating firm in New England, return to give practical help. The Lobkowicz Trust has the task of reuniting the collections, cataloguing and conserving them. Susan Hunt, the project director, aims by degrees to get every room at Roundnice into use. ``We want to establish a language school and research centre at Roundnice. At Nelahozeves there is the opportunity of encouraging local industry to use the new rooms for conferences and events. Unilever has just bought the factory next door,'' she says. William is concerned to dispel any suspicion that he and his wife are returning to a life of luxury. ``Alessandra and I live in a flat in Prague, with a living room, kitchen and two bedrooms. We don't need more.''
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