Bouzov Castle

Bouzov stands on a hill above its village, 28 kilometres north-west of Olomouc, and was probably built at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to watch the trade route from Olomouc to Loštice. It first appears in writing in 1317; its first documented owner was the minor nobleman Búz of Bouzov, recorded from 1317 to 1339, whose name the castle carries. Under the lords of Bouzov it served mostly a defensive and guarding role, probably amounting to a bergfried tower, a rampart and wooden dwelling houses.

From the middle of the fourteenth century Bouzov belonged to the lords of Vildenberk, who built a stone manor on the western side, taller than the rampart. The castle was much widened in the same century, gaining an outer settlement with outhouses, a ditch and circumvallation, and a moat wall. In 1382 the Vildenberks sold it to Margrave Jobst of Moravia, who in 1396 made it over to the lords of Kunštát. They held it about seventy years and fortified it further, adding a new connected rampart with two bastions and rebuilding the moat wall with five round bastions; a round gun-bastion followed, and the tallest watchtower was repaired.

Tradition attaches the castle to the best-known Kunštát, George of Poděbrady, said to have been born at Bouzov in 1420 and crowned king of Bohemia in 1458; his original title was Jiří of Kunštát and Bouzov. The castle passed to Viktorin of Bouzov in 1408, and in the first half of the fifteenth century it was turned into a Hussite stronghold.

The Moravian line of the Haugvics of Biskupice began at Bouzov in 1494, when Jan Haugvic bought the castle; in 1502 Vladislaus Jagiellon raised him and his descendants to the Bohemian lordly estate for faithful service, and he died here late in 1524. From 1499 the family built a palace on the eastern side, joining the northern and southern dwelling ranges. Bouzov burned out in 1558, and its owners' financial difficulties meant it was not fully restored until 1620. Through the Thirty Years' War it served as an imperial fortress and as a prison for captured Swedes.

Eugenie Podstatská of Prusinovice bought Bouzov in 1649, and in 1696 her son sold it to the Teutonic Order, whose grand master was Francis Louis of Palatinate-Neuburg. The order did not reside there and let the castle partly decay; in the eighteenth century only the building in the outer settlement stayed inhabited, and by the end of the nineteenth century the ruin had become a tourist destination.

Archduke Eugen of Austria-Teschen, grand master from 1894 to 1923, resolved to rebuild it in romantic, largely neo-Gothic form, funded with the chapter's consent from the order's estate revenues. Most of the medieval castle was pulled down in 1895 and a new one raised within two years in imitation of south German castles, to designs by Georg von Hauberrisser, architect of the new town hall in Munich; the rebuilding ran on to 1910. Medieval artefacts connected with the order were brought in, the interiors furnished with replicas of medieval furniture and pieces from Eugen's own collection, and part of the castle fitted for public visiting.

After the collapse of Austria-Hungary the new Czechoslovak Republic confiscated the castle from the order, and troops occupied it on 4 November 1918. The act was prompted by the interior furnishings belonging to Archduke Eugen, whose Habsburg family's property in the new state was being confiscated. The soldiers left only in 1923, helped on by Eugen's resignation as grand master and by a ruling of the international court at The Hague that the order was an international religious and charitable institution whose property was not liable to seizure. The order later bought Eugen's property and inventory back from the state, so that the collections stayed together.

The order held Bouzov until the Nazis seized it in 1939. SS units based at the castle mounted operations into the surrounding country; their last was the burning of the village of Javoříčko and the killing of 38 men aged between 15 and 76. After the Second World War the castle was confiscated by the Czechoslovak state.

Bouzov is the property of the Czech Republic, administered by the National Heritage Institute. It has been protected as a cultural monument since 1964 and was entered on the list of national cultural monuments in 1999. The Teutonic Order pressed again for its return in 2016, without success. It ranks among the ten most visited castles in the country and is much used by film-makers.