Orlík Castle

King Přemysl Otakar II probably founded Orlík late in his reign, on a rock spur sixty metres above the Vltava, as a guard post on the road from Milevsko to Mirovice where toll was taken from river traffic. The name comes from the Czech for a young eagle.

Charles IV granted the castle in fief on 4 July 1357 to Dětřich of Portic, bishop of Minden, and on its transfer three years later to the bishop's nephew reserved the right to install his own garrison in war. The Prague burgher Zikmund Huler, who held it from 1395, was allowed to double the raft toll in 1400 and was executed for fraud on 23 June 1405.

Huler's brother Ondřej sold Orlík in 1407 to Petr Zmrzlík of Svojšín, master of the mint, who took the Utraquist side and probably rebuilt much of it. His son Petr, a Hussite captain, entertained Jan Žižka of Trocnov here in 1422; Žižka had a letter written at Orlík calling on Domažlice to resist the second crusade. Orlík was then the Utraquist counterweight to Catholic Zvíkov.

The Zmrzlík brothers went over to Sigismund of Luxembourg in 1427. Jaroslav Zmrzlík held for George of Poděbrady, and therefore fought a small war with the Rožmberks from 1469 to 1472 and with the Švamberks of Zvíkov, backers of Matthias Corvinus, from 1475. The castle burned down in 1508.

Václav Zmrzlík had Orlík released from feudal tenure in 1513 and sold it on 2 February 1514 to Kryštof of Švamberk, whose rebuilding enlarged the living quarters without weakening the defences. Kryštof II made Orlík his principal seat and had it remodelled in Renaissance style by Italian architects, dying in 1582 before it was finished.

Petr II of Švamberk was a director for the lords in the revolt of 1618–20, and Ferdinand II confiscated his property before he died in 1620. An Estates garrison held the castle when four thousand men under Baltasar Marradas and Martin de Hoeff-Huerta besieged it, and surrendered on 5 April 1621 after a morning's exchange of fire. At the end of that August a hundred Estates musketeers from Zvíkov stormed Orlík and took it, but were intercepted near Nevězice as they withdrew with their plunder, and the imperial troops recovered the castle, leaving thirty musketeers in it.

Imperial commissioners reached the confiscated estate on 15 October 1622 and found the château nearly empty: two horses, a cow and six pigs in the farmyard, a third of its villages deserted. Prince Jan Oldřich of Eggenberg bought it on 13 November 1623 and repaired it. The war left the estate alone until 1632, when the Saxon invasion brought a garrison that stayed to the end of the fighting.

The garrison marched out in 1650. When a Turkish invasion was feared in 1683 Orlík was judged strong enough to be armed again, its inventory listing fourteen one-pounder guns and 1,150 roundshot. The Eggenbergs never lived there; their last heir died in 1717 aged thirteen, and Orlík came by Marie Arnoštka's bequest to her nephew Adam František of Schwarzenberg.

Český Krumlov was the Schwarzenbergs' chosen seat, and Orlík stood outside the family's main interest until the division into two lines in 1802; Karel Filip founded the junior line and was the first lord in a long time to live at Orlík permanently. He was the field marshal who beat Napoleon at Leipzig in 1813. A fire interrupted the rebuilding of 1802; the battlements put on the walls and towers of the front during the repairs are reckoned the oldest Romantic remodelling of a feudal seat in Bohemia. The neo-Gothic work of 1849–1860 followed designs by the Prague architect Bernhard Grueber; Karel III built the family tomb between 1861 and 1864.

Karel VI's part in the Declarations of the Czech nobility of 1938–39 cost him the property under the German occupation; it was returned after he joined the anti-Nazi rising at Čimelice in 1945. The Communists confiscated it in 1948 and the family went into exile in Austria. Orlík was placed in the first category of monuments, escaping devastation, and opened to the public with its interiors left as they stood in 1948. The Orlík Reservoir, filled between 1954 and 1962, drowned the valley the castle had stood sixty metres above.

Restored in 1992, the estate has been managed since 2006 by Jan Nepomuk Schwarzenberg. The château is held by the Schwarzenberg family foundation, was listed a national cultural monument on 1 July 2008, and opens from April to October. Karel Schwarzenberg's cremated remains were buried in the family tomb on 9 December 2023, on what would have been his 86th birthday.