Veveří Castle

Legend gives the founding of Veveří — "squirrel's" in Czech, Eichhorn in German — to the Přemyslid duke Conrad I of Brno around 1059, as a hunting lodge on the spur above the Svratka, 12 kilometres northwest of Brno. The first firm record comes in 1213, when its administrator was Štěpán, with a second in 1222. In the 1220s a stone castle began to rise on the promontory tip behind a moat cut into the rock; its keep is the one part of that stage to survive well. Ottokar I held rebellious peers here, and Ottokar II lodged political opponents in it.

John of Bohemia pledged Veveří to Jan of Vartemberk in 1311, and in 1335 his son Charles, later Emperor Charles IV, took it in settlement of a debt. Charles's brother, Margrave John Henry, built the rear part with its two towers and outer ward and raised the main palace around the keep, with its great hall and chapel; the silhouette he gave it is essentially the one it still carries, and he used it as a provincial stronghold and a treasury.

In the Hussite wars Emperor Sigismund stationed mercenaries of his son-in-law Albrecht of Austria around Veveří and pledged it in 1424 to Petr Kutěj. The Hussites besieged it without taking it — dated 1424 by some accounts, 1428–32 by others. Przemyslaus II of Těšín, who rented the castle later in the century and walled it about, backed King George of Poděbrady; in 1468 it was taken by the army of Matthias Corvinus.

Zikmund von Tiefenbach gained the castle by marriage in 1609; its Gothic southern gate was rebuilt in late Renaissance style in 1626. His elder brother Rudolf, a Protestant loyal to the Catholic emperor and later a convert, fought on the Imperial side at the Battle of White Mountain on 8 November 1620; as a reward for the family's loyalty to the Catholic emperors the Tiefenbachs kept castle and manor while most of the Bohemian Protestant nobility was confiscated and driven into exile. In 1645 the Swedish army besieged Veveří as it besieged Brno, and failed against a well-guarded castle and well-armed defenders, though Torstensson's troops plundered the estate.

The castle then changed hands quickly: Rudolf's widow Maria Eva Alžběta of the Sternberg family inherited in 1653, Václav Michal of Althan bought it in 1668, and at the century's end it belonged to the House of Collalto. The Sinzendorfs took the manor in 1707 and rebuilt in Baroque taste, since when the exterior has stayed practically unchanged. In the early 1740s the Prussian army, let in by the treachery of the castle steward, pillaged the interior.

Prince Prosper of Sinzendorf sold castle and manor in 1804 to the industrialist Vilém Mundy. In 1830 Gustav, Prince of Vasa, son of the deposed Gustav IV Adolf of Sweden, bought it from Mundy's heir and began rebuilding it as his family's seat; he divorced in 1844 and the property passed to the Vienna banker Georgios Sinas, whose granddaughter Helena, later Princess Ypsilanti, held it from 1856 until 1881. Baron Maurice de Hirsch then bought Veveří, renewed its roofs and services but pulled down the castle chapel; he died in 1896 and his widow Clara in 1899, after which Maurice de Forest inherited.

Winston Churchill, de Forest's friend, visited three times; in 1908 he and Clementine spent part of their honeymoon there. The land reform of 1921 set de Forest against the Czechoslovak state for almost six years; he sold in 1925 for £100,000.

From 1942 to 1945 the castle was seized for the Wehrmacht and the SS, who set up barracks and a training area. Fighting during the liberation of Brno damaged roofs and façades, left shooting damage on the palace's second floor and destroyed or scattered much of the furniture. Roofs were repaired in 1947 and 1948, but in the early 1950s the castle was closed to the public and crudely adapted for a forestry school that stayed more than twenty years; from 1972 a scheme to turn it into an international student and congress centre got as far as a botched concrete-injection stabilisation that badly damaged the fabric, and the work stopped with the revolution of 1989.

Veveří reopened in 1994, closed abruptly in 1999, and that September passed to the Ministry of Culture and the National Heritage Institute in Brno. State, city and regional money stabilised the worst of the damage and restored the palace; guided tours have run since 2002. Protected as a cultural monument since 1964 and owned by the Czech state, the castle was declared a national cultural monument in November 2022 with effect from 1 July 2023.