Houska Castle

Houska was raised on a sandstone block in the second half of the 13th century, and who ordered it is disputed. Tomáš Durdík placed the foundation at the start of Ottokar II of Bohemia's reign (1253–78), as an administrative centre for the surrounding royal country; Dobroslava Menclová and Rudolf Anděl gave it instead to Jindřich of Dubá between 1280 and 1290, seizing ground beside his family lordship in the disorder after Ottokar's death. Either way the plan failed: the site was too cramped to extend, and the administrative role passed quickly to nearby Bezděz, built by the same masons' lodge. The first written record, in 1291, names a burgrave of Houska — Záviš of Stružnice, of the Ronovec family.

It stood among forests, swamps and hills, with no water beyond a rainwater cistern and no trade route near it; ramparts, bastions and an outer farmyard survived until the 17th century. Folklore supplies its own explanation for the siting: the castle is said to cover a gateway to Hell, its walls turned inward to keep the demons below from reaching the world above. The chapel, the story runs, was built over a pit too deep to see the bottom of, and condemned men were offered a pardon for being lowered into it on a rope — the first came back screaming, with white hair and the wrinkles of thirty years. None of it is history, but it is what brings the camera crews.

By 1316 the castle belonged to the Berkas of Dubá, who held it for over a century. Jindřich Berka the younger backed neither side in the Hussite wars, and perhaps for that reason his estates came through without serious damage; his heir sold Houska with its villages in 1432 to Jan Smiřický of Smiřice, whose widow Markéta of Michalovice kept it even after it was declared escheat to the crown in 1457. In 1502 it went to Václav Hrzán of Harasov, and the Hrzáns rebuilt the Gothic castle as a Renaissance château without surrendering its fortress character — traditionally dated 1584–1590, though the work may have begun decades earlier. Debt forced a sale in 1594, and in 1615 the estate reached Václav Berka of Dubá the elder, a director of the Estates revolt of 1618–1620, who fled the country after its defeat and was sentenced to the loss of his property.

Houska passed to Adam of Valdštejn and almost at once by exchange to Albrecht of Valdštejn — Wallenstein — who attached it to the duchy of Friedland and hunted the country round it. When a Saxon army invaded Bohemia in 1631, bringing exiled nobles home with it, friends of the Berkas seized Houska and held it until December; Wallenstein put forty soldiers into the château at the start of the next year. He was murdered in 1634, and in 1635 Ferdinand II made the castle over in settlement of debt to three imperial creditors.

The place was still reckoned well fortified. In 1639 Swedish troops occupied it on the orders of General Johan Banér and used it to control the surrounding country; imperial forces returned the following year, drew the commander out of the château and killed him, then took the castle by sudden assault. By 1647, when the hejtman Ondřej Stampfer drew up the estate's urbarium, everything belonging to the château was recorded as laid waste.

With the war over, castles an enemy might use as strongpoints in the next one were marked for destruction, and Houska was among them. The estate had passed to the Hofkirchens, whose inheritance was in dispute; armed with an assessment from the engineer Pieroni, they persuaded the regional captains and provincial governors to spare the residential buildings. In the castle core only the decayed tower came down, in 1658; the curtain walls, bastions and farmyard did not survive at all, their stone going into the filling of the moats. Even so, the Gothic ranges still stand to above second-floor level.

Sold on 8 June 1700 to Count Jan Vilém of Kounic, it decayed further — Bohuslav Balbín described it as a ruin — and was kept up only well enough to house the estate's administrator. Count Vincenc Karel Kounic repaired it in 1823 at a cost of 100,000 gulden, four years' revenue from the estate, taking off the Renaissance gables and cutting new windows into the façades.

The Kounics held Houska until 1897, when it went to a princess of the Hohenlohe family; her younger sister, Countess Eleonora Andrássy, inherited in 1918, and in 1924 Josef Šimonek, president of Škoda, bought it. His restoration of 1929–1930 brought back the Gothic paintings and architectural detail.

During the Second World War, until 1945, the château was held as confiscated property by the German army — specifically the regional SS staff. In August 1943 the Reich Security Main Office moved archive and library material out of Hamburg and Berlin, threatened by American bombing, into the building; under the codename Burgund II it became one of four North Bohemian depositories for Jewish and Masonic books taken from across Europe. That occupation fed the castle's other reputation: the story went round the villages that the Germans were drawing on the "powers of Hell" for their experiments. The State Library's Klementinum archive was housed here from 1950, and at the end of 1974 the castellan Svatopluk Karásek let The Plastic People of the Universe make what survives as their oldest recording there. Josef Šimonek's heirs recovered the castle in restitution in the early 1990s; they repaired it, and it has been open to the public since 1999.