To have and have not again (part 2)

To have and have not again (part 2)
Melnik Castle is famous for its vineyards. / Photo: CC
By Stephen Weeks in Prague June 28, 2017

Bettina Lobkowicz was sitting in the Czech prime minister’s office in the mid 1990s on a special mission. She had been tipped off that in his office there was a valuable piece of furniture taken from the medieval castle that her husband, Jiri, had won back from the state a few years earlier after the collapse of communism.

She quickly spotted, over the premier’s shoulder, the fine Renaissance cabinet, whose twin had already been given back with the fortress in 1992. The Lobkowiczs had won a court order for the return of the castle’s furniture but nothing was officially listed on the inventory about the cabinet’s whereabouts, although it was no doubt carefully accounted for. So, by luck more than anything, Bettina Lobkowicz reunited her cabinets, and they are both to be seen today on the Melnik Castle tour.

The Lobkowiczs’ problem was a common one for former aristocrats who had managed to outwit a hostile post-communist bureaucracy and regain their castles. Restituants had to guess where the contents of their properties might be stored; they wouldn’t be told whether they were correct unless they asked. It forced restituants to become detectives – and their possessions could be in any one of hundreds of state institutions – or stolen or destroyed. The contents of the world-famous Roudnice Castle library, for example, had been shovelled out of the first floor window by Soviet soldiers onto waiting army lorries and taken to be ground up for potato fertiliser.

Many restituants also had to rectify the massive neglect, if not vandalism, of their properties that had often taken place during the 40 years of communism. Many castles were used for completely inappropriate purposes and adapted for their new role in tasteless and damaging ways. Some interiors were filled with communal bathrooms, while corridors were sub-divided by ghastly glass-brick partitions.

Castolovice Castle had been partly used as a refrigerator repairman’s training school. Diana Sternberg-Phipps, its restituant, has made a great success of her restoration of the family seat; the rooms occupied by the refrigerator repairmen are now turned into imaginatively furnished guest rooms, supplementing the income from castle tours and special events.

In Eastern Bohemia, Frantisek Kinsky has just completed work on the family chateau of Kostelec nad Orlici, where, helped by an EU grant, a totally derelict baroque palace has risen again to glory. I saw it at its worst, and although I am an optimist I had thought it was probably a hopeless case.

Frantisek’s father had stuck it out through communism, barred from living in his house and forced to watch its gradual decay from the adjacent stables – a not uncommon form of torture that was doled out to owners of fine buildings. Luckily, old Count Kinsky lived just long enough to see his son revive the house in which the old man had been born.

Melnik and Castolovice had – like many other grand State Castles – been used as museums, and so they are again. Melnik, which has a noted vineyard, or Nelahozoves, which has a famous painting collection, are big draws today. But even less well known and heavily reconstructed chateaux such as Kostelec nad Orlici are run as successful businesses catering to tourists, weddings and conferences.

Poorly equipped

However, many returning owners in the 1990s who were faced with opening their castles for the first time or, in some cases, taking over badly run State Castles, found themselves poorly equipped for the task, with virtually no help available from the state. The returning owners had mostly not lived in historic houses in their two generations of exile, let alone castles with estates. The entire craft of owning, living in and also sharing an historic house with the public – and getting it to support itself financially – was alien to them.

The British example is useful by way of contrast. In Britain in the early 1970s the Historic Houses Association was formed for the private owners of historic houses to act as a body to lobby for grants and tax breaks for the maintenance of architectural and cultural heritage, and to raise standards in the running of their houses as visitor attractions.

Tough competition from the National Trust forced standards up – and an annual trade show in London enabled the spread of ideas on presentation, in souvenirs, in restoration materials;  all to encourage the serious business of opening a house to the public.

The great stately homes of England had anyway been in the tourism business from the 1950s – and a way of doing this had developed that did not compromise either the historic atmosphere of a house or its primary purpose as the country seat of its owner. Genuine income resulted which has sustained these great houses, enabling many of them to operate successfully without government subsidy for operational expenses.

In the Czech Lands all this was in its infancy – an attempt to start a Castle Owners’ Association has really only been a social gathering, and it certainly has no political teeth.

After European Union accession in 2004, EU grants, under the Regional Operation Programme, have certainly helped revive several castles – and a revived castle, open for business as a heritage and cultural attraction, helps enormously to regenerate the communities in which they stand. The UK’s National Trust has estimated that of the total money expended on a visit to see an historic house, 95% of it was not spent in the house and grounds but in the area – in lodging, in other activities, in restaurants and so on.

Kept in a poor state

Most of the 110 remaining State Castles – which had usually been owned by ethnic Germans and were hence ineligible for restitution – are run at a loss, and it is easy to see why. State Castles are generally run for the benefit of their staff, rather than visitors, and suffer from lack of investment. They often have limited opening hours, dull compulsory guided tours, and contain dated, uninformative displays, with descriptions rarely in anything other than Czech.

All the while, the Czech authorities continue to obstruct attempts by former owners to regain these properties so that they can be properly maintained and rejuvenated.

The case of the restitution of Opocno Castle has been going on since 1991. The builders of the castle (together with a hospital and school at Opocno and many other community amenities on their once vast estates in Bohemia) were the Colloredo-Mansfeld family, once princes in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who filled it with a famous collection of armour and old master paintings.

The family, who fled to Austria after the communist coup in 1948, has been trying for a quarter of a century to regain their property without success. No-one can explain why the NPU (the body administering the State Castles) will use any trickery to hold on to Opocno. It’s not an iconic castle and its tourism numbers are not high at about 20,000 visitors a year. Nevertheless the Ministry of Culture appears to have co-ordinated all ministries to block its restitution.

The guides showing visitors the castle still describe the Colloredo-Mansfelds as Nazi sympathisers when the truth is starkly different: Prince Josef, having signed the aristocratic declaration against the Nazi occupation, had his castle and estates confiscated – and he and his wife were moved into a damp cottage. He was forced to work in a factory, sweeping floors. His wife contracted TB from the damp conditions. Despite this he was able to assist a couple of British POWs who had escaped from a camp in Poland (I located their families in Wales).

In 1945 a court dealt with the German issue, and over fifty affidavits and other pieces of evidence were considered in support of the Colloredo-Mansfeld’s loyalty, and they were cleared to return to Opocno. However, in 1948 it was all taken away again when the communists seized power.

After the collapse of communism, the matter of the castle restitution went all the way to the Supreme Court, which in February 2017 finally turned down the restitution based on ‘independent evidence’ – that being a suspicious denouncement, full of lies that would have made Stalin blush.

Now comes the oddity: a different court restituted 4,000 hectares of surrounding forestry and the hunting park back to the family, and the collection of pictures. This would have been therefore a wonderful opportunity for an historic house to be reunited with its estate, which would be run as a traditional family property with the profits from forestry funding the operation and improvement of a great house.

The case of the Prince of Liechtenstein is even more striking. The prince tried very hard 10 years ago to regain his two glorious Moravian castles of Valtice and Lednice. The false arguments of German nationality were easily demolished – although he had been exiled to the tiny German-speaking principality that bears the family name, the two counties it comprised had in fact been named after the Czech noble family which had bought them.

In 1945, having been given permission to take out one railway car’s worth of his famous art collection, the then prince realised – after the wagon had crossed over to Austria – that he still had the permission document in his hand. Accounts vary as to how many times and for how many wagons that single document worked, but certainly the Liechensteins managed to keep hold of a large part of their collection of paintings, including many Renaissance and baroque masterpieces.

Twelve years ago the current prince made an offer to the Czech Republic that if he could restitute Valtice and Lednice Castles and their parks (Lednice’s park is Unesco listed for its spectacular follies) he would forego the thousands of hectares of farmland, vineyards and forest his family had once owned, and he would reinstate the art collection, as well, of course, as restoring the two castles at a probable cost of about €64mn.

The offer, which would have acted as the hub of regeneration and transformed the economy of the entire region, was dismissed out of hand. Nothing can be said in favour of this ridiculous decision. This was a final offer, and the prince then spent the money on refurbishing a spare palace he owned in Vienna, where he has installed the fabled Valtice Art Collection, greatly to Vienna’s benefit – and to the Czech Republic’s loss.

Stephen Weeks is a castle conservationist and author. This is the second of two articles on the restitution and resurrection of Czech castles. The first part can be read here.

 

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