Castle Rožmitál pod Třemšínem

The castle was founded in the 13th century by Oldřich of the Buzic line, the first to style himself "of Rožmitál". Known in German as Rosenthal, the valley of roses, it was raised in marshy ground where water played an important part in its defence.

In 1347 Sezima gave half the castle, the town and all its villages to the Archbishopric of Prague, a division that set Sezima's brother Zdeněk against Archbishop Arnošt of Pardubice. The archbishops held their half until the start of the Hussite Wars. In 1436 King Sigismund mortgaged that half to the brothers Jan and Václav Zmrzlík of Svojšín for 2,000 threescore groschen. How the Lords of Rožmitál recovered it is not recorded; the reunited estate stayed with them until 1545.

Among the most important of the family was Joanna of Rožmitál, Czech queen and wife of King George of Poděbrady. Her brother Jaroslav Lev led George's diplomatic mission to the courts of Europe, charged with uniting them against the Turks. Jaroslav's son Zdeněk Lev, supreme hofmeister of the Bohemian Kingdom, was the last prominent man of the line; under him came the remodelling that laid the ground for the Renaissance rebuilding. A large tower went up in the late Gothic work, and probably under Zdeněk Lev a slightly younger four-room palace, for which part of the perimeter wall was demolished. The tower was given bay windows at the same time, and by the historical descriptions and depictions the late Gothic castle was fortified with ramparts and a wall carrying round bastions or towers.

Zdeněk Lev lived expensively and lent heavily to nobles and to the king while running deep into debt himself, which made him at once the greatest creditor and the greatest debtor of his day. After his death the whole property, Rožmitál among it, had to be made over to the creditors, and his sons Zdeněk, Jan and Adam left Bohemia for Moravia, where they became courtiers of Bishop Jan Dúbravius at Olomouc.

Between 1550 and 1555 Florián Gryspek of Gryspach, a nobleman of Bavarian-Austrian origin, bought up the estate piece by piece from the creditors. In 1559–1564 he had the castle rebuilt in the Italian Renaissance manner: the two-storey Great, or Gryspek, Palace stepped out beyond the original oval of the walls, and the gate tower was raised by two further floors. Sgraffito panels and rosette window frames of the 1570s survive on the tower.

Gryspek founded a brewery, a bakery and granaries, and brought water through wooden pipes from a rise near Voltuš to a courtyard fountain. The estate stayed with the Gryspeks until September 1622, when Emperor Ferdinand II confiscated all their property for their part in the Estates Revolt.

A year after the confiscation the king gave castle and estate to the Archbishop of Prague, Arnošt Vojtěch of Harrach, with an order to bring the district's defiant inhabitants back to the Catholic faith. In 1627 the imperial commissioner for the reformation, Jan Přibík Jeníšek, arrived with Jesuits and soldiers, and those being converted were held in the castle gaol; many fled into the woods. Harrach himself did not approve of forced conversion.

The archbishops used the castle only as a summer residence, and it burned four times in their hands. Harrach had it repaired after the fire of 1660; after that of 1724 forty years passed before Archbishop Manderscheid-Blankenheim restored it, the tower now a storey lower.

Archbishop Vilém Florentin, Prince Salm, had a garden made out of the old bog during his time at Rožmitál between 1793 and 1810; laid out in the English style, it stood open to the public until the 1850s. Salm took to the district and used to say he wished to be buried there. When he died at Hahnbach in 1810 his body was laid overnight in the church of St John Nepomuk on the town square as it travelled to Prague, and it was declared that he would be buried at Rožmitál; a letter came from Prague that the funeral must take place in the capital. The people would not give the body up, and only soldiers called in from Březnice got it back. The Rožmitál rebels were flogged in the castle courtyard, and the reeve Václav Stránský was put out of his office and gaoled in Prague with the other ringleaders.

The third fire, on 27 October 1813, spread from burning barns, and in 1893 the director of the archbishop's estates judged the castle very poor and neglected. August Sedláček, visiting at the end of the century, found nothing of interest in it but the chapel. The archbishopric repaired the roofs and facades at the start of the 20th century, brought in a water main and roofed the gallery on the tower. On the night of 4–5 March 1940 the second floor of the Gryspek Palace burned when billeted Wehrmacht soldiers stoked the stoves until a beam walled into a chimney caught. Repairs ran on into the following summer, when the tower gallery was restored and the foot-gate beside the main gate, walled up after the 1724 fire, was opened again. After the war German soldiers and Gestapo informers were held prisoner in the castle.

The castle was nationalised in 1948 and its furnishings taken to other castles or stolen; the castle archive, by a story often told in the town, ended up in the waste paper. The brewery Gryspek had founded in the second half of the 16th century did not survive either: the Ministry of Economy and Labour shut it down from 1 July 1942 and it never worked again, its plant sold in 1948 to a brewery at Nitra and its malt kiln pulled down in 1979. The Czechoslovak State Forests turned the rooms into flats and offices, unmaintained, into the 1970s; in 1974 the town took over and began a reconstruction meant to end in a museum of regional history by 2000. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 stopped it, and work did not resume. Offered back to the Archbishopric in 1990 and refused, it was accepted on a second approach in 1998 and passed to a private company, Trinity Coop, whose renovation ran out of money. The new owner carried on the structural securing and finished the caretaker's house, but by 2006 all work had fallen silent, and want of maintenance left the castle a target for vandals with its grounds growing over. On 9 June 2013 the roof and ceilings of a barn beside the castle came down after damage by vandals, and the town had the ruins pulled down for safety. On 23 October 2014 part of the roof over the oldest range, latterly the brewery, fell in.

A civic initiative wrote to the owners in 2017, backed by the Czech National Trust, and the Rožmitálský zámek association followed in 2019 to open the castle and draw it back into the life of the town. Volunteers and the town cleared self-seeded growth and rubbish dumps; the castle opened to the public for the first time in years on 22 December 2018. Since July 2019 it has opened on Saturdays from May to September for guided tours that take in the tower, and the association runs concerts, theatre, workshops, exhibitions and a summer cinema in the courtyard through the season. Smaller repairs have been paid for out of visitors' contributions, sponsorship and grants: new doors for the main gate in 2021, and part of the shingle roofing on the Old and Small Palaces replaced in 2023 and 2024. Film-makers used the castle in 2023 as Grünewald Manor for Nosferatu. It remains privately owned and has been protected as a cultural monument since 1958.