Český Šternberk Castle

The castle was founded in 1241 by the Bohemian nobleman Zdeslav z Divišova (d. 1265) on a sharp rock above the middle Sázava, at about 350 metres. Its name came from his arms, a golden eight-pointed star — Stern and Berg, star and mountain — and he took the name Sternberg himself, under the motto "The star that never falls down". The early Gothic core is still the heart of the building, which is reckoned one of the best preserved Gothic castles in Bohemia.

Long-range firearms found the castle unready in the 14th century: its 13th-century builders had not foreseen them, and the defences were strengthened with a three-storey tower to the north, linked to the castle by a rampart. The castle changed hands for the first time in the 15th century, passing to the Holický branch of the Sternbergs. In 1467 it was taken by the royal army of George of Poděbrady, the blame falling on Zdeněk Konopišťský of Sternberg (d. 1476), guardian of the young Petr II Holický (d. 1514) a member of the Zelená Hora League who had taken part in the revolt against the king. King Vladislaus Jagiellon returned castle and estate to the Sternbergs in 1479, and by the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries the ruined castle had been rebuilt and its defensive system renewed.

The forward bastion on the ridge south of the castle was built after the siege of 1467 — or, by another reading, stood there already, with the battery tower inserted into it later in place of an older timber structure that Tomáš Durdík took for the garrison's cabin. The tower is polygonal, with a pronounced prow turned south, a spiral stair at the back, a cellar store that was probably the powder magazine, and five short passages running from a central round room to gun loops, one of them replaced by a portal through which cannon could be hauled up. Below it, against the wall, stood a log building with a tiled stove where the garrison lived.

The narrow passages left no room for carriage-mounted guns and gave hand weapons poor angles, and since similarly ineffective defences occur at other castles it is possible that the tower was only meant to demonstrate that the place could be defended, or that the weight of its defence rested on a lost top storey. Further south, earthworks that Dobroslava Menclová read as the siege camp of 1467–68 include a neck ditch up to seven metres deep, now partly filled, with a rampart along its outer side; their character and sheer bulk point rather to an extensive forward fortification of the castle's own, most likely stormed during the royal siege and turned to the besiegers' use.

The castle came through the looting of rebels in 1627, during the Thirty Years' War. When Imperial Count Jan Václav, High Burgrave of Moravia, died in 1712 the male line of the Holický branch ended and the castle passed by inheritance and sale to owners outside the family; in 1751 the lower palace was built against the surrounding wall, the last major work on the site. The stair holds 545 engravings, mostly scenes of the Thirty Years' War from the chronicle Theatrum Europaeum, among the largest single-subject collections of their kind in Europe. Rebuilding in Baroque and Rococo taste partly concealed the Gothic, above all indoors, where the Italian stuccoist Carlo Brentano decorated the halls and salons — dated to the 17th century by some accounts, to 1760 by others.

Zdeněk of Sternberg, of the Konopiště branch, bought the castle back in 1841, and his family held it until the state expropriated it in 1949. The Sternbergs moved to a small flat in Prague, and Jiří Sternberg (1888–1965) took the post of castellan on what had been his own property, showing visitors round; he compiled an inventory of the castle and so saved many of its original furnishings. Restitution returned Český Šternberk in 1992 to his son, Count Zdeněk Sternberg, and since Zdeněk's death in 2021 it has been administered by his son Filip Sternberg, born in 1956. It is protected as a cultural monument and, since 2008, as a national cultural monument, and is open to the public on a tour route of sixteen rooms.