Kroměříž Castle

Kroměříž belonged to the bishops of Olomouc for most of its recorded history: Bishop Jan II bought the market settlement in 1110, though by other accounts the bishops' ownership of the town begins only in the 13th century. Bruno of Schauenburg made it a seat of power, raising Kroměříž to a town in 1261, moving the bishopric's administration there and building a Gothic castle on the ground the present château occupies. The bishops lost control during the Hussite wars and regained it only in the 1470s, which prompted Stanislav I Thurzo to replace the castle in 1500 with a more comfortable residence, late Gothic in style with a modicum of Renaissance detail.

In 1643 Kroměříž was taken and wrecked by the Swedish army under General Lennart Torstenson, and the castle sacked. Rebuilding waited until the mid-1660s, when Karel II of Liechtenstein-Castelcorn commissioned the imperial court architect Filiberto Lucchese, whose chief monument here is the Pleasure Garden laid out away from the castle. On Lucchese's death in 1666 Giovanni Pietro Tencalla finished the formal garden and rebuilt the palace in a manner recalling the Turinese school he belonged to. Engravings completed in 1691 show the Pleasure Garden fully enclosed, half ornamental parterre and half orchard.

Karel II also began the collections. The largest part of the picture gallery was bought in Cologne in 1673; it is generally reckoned the second finest in the country and includes Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas, his last mythological painting. The same bishop founded the library, whose oldest treasure is the Kroměříž Sacramentary of the later 9th century, and left his coins and medals to the bishopric — the nucleus of a cabinet of 10,167 pieces, considered one of the largest of its kind in Europe.

Fire ran through the town in March 1752, destroying dozens of houses and gutting the château's second floor and interiors. Rebuilding took twenty years and was completed under Bishop Hamilton, who brought in two leading imperial artists, Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Josef Stern, to decorate the halls; Maulbertsch's frescoes of 1759 are in the Vassals' Hall, where the bishops held their feudal diets and courts. The private chapel of St Sebastian was consecrated on 20 April 1766, and the tower — burnt in 1643 and again in 1752 — was finally repaired in 1768 and newly covered in copper.

The Constituent Imperial Diet of the Austrian peoples had opened in Vienna on 22 July 1848 and was broken off on 7 October as the revolution escalated, moving to Kroměříž, where it sat through 1849 in the château's Assembly Hall — a rococo room 30 metres long, 14 wide and 16 high, fitted with a tiered wooden platform for the deputies, while the club of Slav members met to confer in another room of the château. In 1885 the château hosted the meeting of Tsar Alexander III and Emperor Franz Joseph I, which the tsar marked with a life-size portrait of himself and a vase of Ural malachite. The archbishops kept a guard of about twenty men, for whom a building of their own went up in 1832–36 between the château and the Mill Gate; it was disbanded altogether in 1919.

In the last days of the Second World War German soldiers in retreat set fire to the tower; the townspeople put it out, and the 84-metre tower — incorporating the square defensive tower of the bishops' medieval castle — was reconstructed in 1947–48. The whole complex was declared a national cultural monument in 1995 and inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1998, the nomination dossier judging the castle "a good but not outstanding example of a type of aristocratic or princely residence that has survived widely in Europe" while calling the Pleasure Garden "a very rare and largely intact example of a Baroque garden". The 19th-century English garden nearer the palace was damaged in the floods of 1997.

The château and its collections belong to the Archbishopric of Olomouc; the National Heritage Institute's Kroměříž administration is based in the building, and the Archdiocesan Museum in Olomouc curates the collections. Two floors, the tower and the sala terrena are open to visitors. A five-year restoration costing nearly 250 million crowns was finished in 2024, renewing the roof structure and the Assembly Hall; in January 2025 staff from Palacký University found tonnes of amethyst from Květnice near Tišnov under mortar in one of the sala terrena grottoes, and a treasury of 15th- and 16th-century pieces opened in the tower that year.