Znojmo Castle

The first castle here was timber, set on the rock above the Dyje where the river valley and the country around it could be watched, and built to replace an older stronghold across the Granice valley as part of strengthening the river line against attack from Austria. Its date is given as about 1080, the work of the Přemyslid duke Bretislav I, and also as some point after 1092, when Znojmo became a separate appanage. In 1140 the wooden castle was besieged and destroyed.

Rebuilding at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries gave Znojmo a castle in stone. The spur was cut off by a ditch hacked through the rock, and the core took a cylindrical bergfrit eleven metres across, a palace and a Romanesque chapel with a long apse; of these only the chapel and part of the palace's outer wall survive in the later masonry. An octagonal Romanesque tower, the Robber's Tower, stood at the gate to the outer bailey, evidence that the builders knew architecture from the circle of Frederick of Hohenstaufen.

When Ottokar I founded the royal town of Znojmo the castle became its stronghold, tied into the town walls and holding a strong garrison. Early in the fifteenth century supporters of Margrave Prokop took the place, and in 1404 they held it through a siege by Duke Albrecht of Austria and King Sigismund.

The bergfrit was lowered before 1523. As a royal castle Znojmo was repeatedly pledged to noblemen — Albrecht of Leskovec, Zdeněk of Roupov — and it was taken from Roupov after the Battle of the White Mountain for his part in the estates' revolt. Its military importance fell away towards the end of the seventeenth century, once the Turkish threat had been turned back by Prince Eugene of Savoy, and in 1710 the Emperor Joseph I redeemed the castle.

After 1710 Maxmilián of Deblín had the old castle rebuilt in the Baroque, the ranges pulled together into three wings with short projections at their ends; the Gothic and Renaissance fabric absorbed into them was by then in very poor condition. When the last of the family died a violent death the building was turned into a military hospital, gaining late-Classicist fronts in the conversion. The front of the castle was sold to townspeople and became the town brewery, home of Hostan beer, and the brewery buildings driven into the site damaged much of the old complex. The octagonal tower at the gate, left to neglect, fell in 1892. Surviving from the dukes' castle is the Romanesque rotunda of St Catherine, its interior painted with frescoes of biblical scenes and of the life of Přemysl, and the whole is protected as a cultural monument of the Czech Republic.