Rabí Castle

Rabí sits on a rocky spur above the middle course of the Otava, 529 metres up and some eight kilometres north-east of Sušice, in the foothills of the Bohemian Forest about 130 kilometres south-west of Prague. The name has been read two ways, either from the German raben, a raven, or as a worn-down Czech vrab(č)í vrch, sparrow's peak. Its beginnings are no clearer. The Lords of Velhartice were long taken to be its builders, but the surviving Romanesque masonry raises the possibility that it went up in the thirteenth century under the Wittelsbachs, in the northern part of a domain that returned to the Bohemian crown only in 1273. The owners of nearby Budětice, who came of the Velhartice line, acquired it after that.

The purpose credited to the Velhartice lords was practical: to guard the trade routes running along the Otava and to keep watch on the gold-bearing deposits in the river. They are credited with a strong palace, ramparts and a keep, the core of a castle of the donjon type. The first written mention comes only in 1380, by which time Rabí already belonged to Půta Švihovský of Rýzmberk, whose family would go on to add the outer ward and two square towers.

In 1399 the castle passed to Půta's brother Břeněk Švihovský of Rýzmberk, who had it enlarged and newly fortified. By the Hussite wars it belonged to Břeněk's son Jan Rabský of Rýzmberk, who with his brother Vilém stood among the foremost opponents of the Hussites in western Bohemia. The family looked to Rabí as a haven for the district's supporters of the Catholic side and for their treasures.

In 1420 and again in 1421 an army led by Jan Žižka of Trocnov came before the castle. At the first siege the garrison surrendered without a fight; at the second it resisted, and there in July 1421 Žižka lost his second eye. Legend has it that a bolt shot from a crossbow struck the trunk of a pear tree and drove a splinter into his one good eye. The castle was taken all the same, and according to the historian August Sedláček the Hussites captured Menhart of Hradec and did great damage to the estates round about. Jan Rabský had the place repaired by 1427.

Vilém the younger Švihovský of Rýzmberk inherited the estate in 1450 and died in 1479 or 1480. Půta Švihovský of Rýzmberk, the provincial governor, took it over and began a considered remodelling, a late Gothic campaign that also walled the little town below the rock. New living quarters and service buildings went up, the castle was enlarged and its fortifications heightened, the master builder Benedikt Rejt most likely having a hand in the work. The new ramparts ran up to six metres thick, with bastions, vallum work and moats, and were full of devices modern for their day, though the execution suggests their theory was not fully understood and the whole may have been partly for show.

Půta's sons Břetislav and Vilém carried the work on until 1530, but the scale of it outran what the family could pay, and the fortifications were left unfinished. Odder business is recorded from Půta's own time: alchemical experiments went on at Rabí, and a German alchemist who failed to turn lead into gold was shut up in the castle's massive prismatic tower, while Půta is said to have had three nannies walled up alive for turning his wife against his brothers. In 1549 the Švihovský had to sell.

Jindřich Krucpach of Trachenberk bought the estate, then Diviš Malovec of Libějovice in 1557 and Vilém of Rožmberk two years after him; the Chanovský of Dlouhá Ves acquired it next, in 1563 by some accounts and in 1570 by others. None of them put money into the castle, using only the buildings that already stood. Under the Chanovský its upkeep was neglected and it began to fall into ruin. During the Thirty Years' War Mansfeld's soldiers plundered it. Jan Vilém Chanovský died in 1625 and his heirs fell to law over the property, which was split in 1648 between one of his cousins and the brothers Jan Karel and Jan Albrecht Chanovský. Emperor Ferdinand III ordered the castle destroyed after 1650; in the end it was spared, on condition that it was never repaired, and in time the walls became a quarry for the local peasantry. Jan Vilém the younger reunited the divided halves in 1694 and in 1708 sold the abandoned castle to Jan Filip of Lamberg, bishop of Passau.

The Lambergs were old Austrian nobility, and Cardinal Jan Filip of Lamberg (1651–1712) took the chance to build a landed base in the Bohemian Forest foothills: Žichovice with its eighteen villages, bought from the Kolovrats in 1707, then Rabí in 1708 and neighbouring Žihobce in 1710. When he took the Rabí estate over from the Chanovský the castle itself was not named in the contract at all, which means it was already uninhabitable. The cardinal soon had the last furnishings and the archive carted away. Not long afterwards, in 1708 or 1710, the castle burned and lost its roofs, and was left to its fate, though a dwelling for one estate official is still recorded there in the first half of the eighteenth century. The cellars were filled with rubbish, the crumbling masonry served the townspeople below as building stone, and towards the end of the eighteenth century the lordship itself took stone from it to shore up the banks of the Otava. Treasure hunters brought down one of the watchtowers in 1783.

The cardinal, a churchman, left no children. He turned his Bohemian holdings into an entail worth a quarter of a million gulden, which went to his nephew František Antonín (1678–1759); neither he nor his descendants lived in Bohemia, having seats enough in the Austrian lands. When that line died out in 1797 Rabí passed to Prince Karel Eugen (1765–1831), the first Lamberg to settle at the chateau in Žihobce. Until then the family's interest in the castle had run no further than occasional work on its chapel. Prince Gustav Jáchym (1812–1862), moved by romanticism, wanted to rebuild it for permanent residence and gave the plan up as too costly, but he later forbade the local people to carry off any more masonry, an early step towards conserving the ruin, and by the middle of the century Rabí had become a popular excursion, with a viewpoint made at its highest point on his initiative.

Gustav Jáchym's marriage to a local country girl, Kateřina Hrádková, was a scandal that cut his children out of the inheritance, and after his early death his descendants and distant Lamberg relatives went to law for years over both the estates and the princely title. The provincial court awarded the Bohemian properties to František Emerich of Lamberg in 1878, without the title. The last private owner was his younger brother, Count Jindřich Lamberg (1841–1929), imperial and royal general of cavalry and hereditary member of the Austrian House of Lords.

A society for the preservation, upkeep and safeguarding of historical, artistic and church monuments in the Strakonice, Sušice and Horažďovice districts was founded at Horažďovice in 1913. Count Jindřich Lamberg became its honorary protector but would not allow repairs to the castle. That changed with the Czechoslovak republic: under the land reform he gave up his claim to Rabí in 1920 for the symbolic price of one Czechoslovak crown. The society began repairs immediately, coupled with archaeological investigation, and the work ran on until 1947.

In 1953 Rabí was declared state cultural property, and the formal deed of gift between the Horažďovice society and the ministry of education, sciences and arts followed in 1954; the ruins stayed open to the public throughout. In the 1960s the castle passed from the ministry to the state institute for monument care and nature protection in Plzeň, and on 6 October 1978 it was proclaimed a national cultural monument. Part of the eastern palace collapsed in 1981 and the whole site was closed, reopening in 1986 after several years of reconstruction and safety work. Since 2003 the ruins, the largest castle by area in the country and owned by the Czech state, have been in the care of the National Heritage Institute, open by four visitor circuits, with a small museum in the reconstructed rooms.