Nelahozeves Castle

Nelahozeves was begun in 1553 for Florian Griespek of Griespach as a Renaissance castle above the Vltava, its facades covered in diamond-point sgraffito, and it passed to the Lobkowicz family in the seventeenth century. It is theirs again after restitution and it holds a substantial part of their collection - one of the largest private art holdings in Central Europe, with paintings by Cranach, Brueghel the Elder, Velazquez and Canaletto, along with arms, ceramics and a very important music archive containing manuscripts annotated by Beethoven and original parts for works the family commissioned. In the village below stands the small house where Antonin Dvorak was born in 1841, now a museum with his family's rooms and material on his early life. The two together make the visit: a magnate collection and a butcher's son's birthplace a few hundred metres apart.

History

The village name comes from Nelahoda, its probable founder, and Nelahozeves is first mentioned in 1352, when the Church of Saint Andrew already stood; it belonged to the royal chamber, then to the Metropolitan Chapter of Saint Vitus, and after the Hussite Wars again to the Czech kings. In 1544 Florian Griesbeck of Griesbach acquired it and began building the castle in 1553, and his son Blažej completed it in its final form in 1613. When Blažej died in 1620 he left the estate in debt, and Polyxena of Lobkowicz bought it in 1623. The estate suffered in the Thirty Years' War but recovered in the second half of the 17th century, and Václav Eusebius Lobkowicz reconstructed the castle as the centre for administering his estates, though it never served as the family's residence. The railway came in 1850, and the village is also known as the birthplace of the composer Antonín Dvořák (Wikipedia, Nelahozeves).

The main sights

• Diamond-point sgraffito - covering the Renaissance facades of the 1550s.
• The Lobkowicz collection - Cranach, Brueghel, Velazquez and Canaletto among it.
• A music archive - manuscripts annotated by Beethoven, and commissioned parts.
• Dvorak's birthplace - the small house in the village, now a museum.

When to go

April to October. Half a day.

Good to know

The castle and the Dvorak house are separate tickets and separate opening hours; the birthplace closes on Mondays and Tuesdays. Parts of the collection rotate to Prague. The village is small.

Nearby

Veltrusy chateau is downstream; Melnik is north.