Bezdez Castle

Bezdez was begun before 1264 for Premysl Otakar II and built up to about 1280 on a phonolite cone of 604 metres rising out of the flat sandstone country, and it matters because almost nothing was done to it afterwards: it was a royal castle designed as a whole and never remodelled into a residence, so the surviving fabric is a single coherent thirteenth-century design. The chapel is the finest part, an early Gothic room with a ribbed vault, engaged columns and window tracery of court quality, essentially intact. There are two towers and a long palace along the ridge. The young Wenceslas II was imprisoned here as a child. In the Thirty Years War it passed to Wallenstein, who in 1627 made it a monastery for Benedictines from Montserrat; it was a place of pilgrimage until the monastery was dissolved in 1785, and then fell into decay. Karel Hynek Macha climbed it repeatedly and it runs through his writing and through Czech Romantic painting. The approach is a steady forty-five minutes on foot with the last section steep.

History

King Ottokar II began building Bezděz before 1264, on the phonolite hill of Velký Bezděz, 604 metres high, as a royal castle both inaccessible and fit for a king, and it rose between about 1260 and 1280. A year after Ottokar's death at the Marchfeld, his widow Kunhuta and their young son Wenceslaus II were held prisoner in the unfinished castle by the boy's guardian, Otto of Brandenburg; when his mother escaped, the six- or seven-year-old stayed on alone, and as king he came back to order the chapel, today the best preserved part of the castle. Completed under Wenceslaus II, it served the kings as a hunting seat until the Thirty Years' War, when it passed to Albrecht of Wallenstein; he began turning it into a fortress in 1623, stopped, and in 1627 gave it to Benedictines from Montserrat, who brought a copy of the Black Madonna in 1666 and made it a place of pilgrimage, with Stations of the Cross along the path from 1686. Joseph II dissolved the monastery in 1785 and the castle decayed until the Romantics took it up; Karel Hynek Mácha and Bedřich Smetana were among those it inspired (Wikipedia, Bezděz Castle).

Highlights

• A single-phase royal castle - built about 1260-1280 and never remodelled.
• An intact early Gothic chapel - ribbed vault and tracery of court quality.
• A volcanic cone at 604 metres - standing alone above flat sandstone country.
• Macha's mountain - central to Czech Romantic writing and painting.

When to go

April to October. Half a day.

What to expect

There is no vehicle access - it is forty-five minutes up on foot, steep at the end. Roofless throughout. Seasonal opening and it closes in bad weather. No facilities on top.

Nearby

Lake Macha is below; Houska castle is south.

Key facts