Czocha Castle

Czocha rose as a stronghold on the Bohemian–Lusatian border, its construction ordered in the middle of the 13th century, between 1241 and 1247, by Wenceslaus I of Bohemia — some accounts credit the Silesian Piast dukes instead. Built on gneiss rock beside Lake Leśnia and the Kwisa river, its oldest surviving part is the keep; the stone castle proper dates from 1329, with residential ranges added later. In 1253 the castle passed into the hands of the Bishop of Meissen. It became part of the duchy of Henry I of Jawor in 1319, given with the surrounding lands as a dowry, and after a relative's death in 1346 passed, together with the whole duchy, to Bolko II the Small, Duke of Świdnica-Jawor, and his wife Agnes. When Agnes died, a survivorship pact with the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV brought Czocha within the Bohemian Crown by the mid-14th century.

Between 1389 and 1453 the castle belonged to the noble families of von Dohna and von Kluks. It withstood a Hussite siege in the early 15th century, though in 1427 a detachment under Czirnin seized it while its owners were away; some accounts hold it was retaken again soon after. In 1453 the Nostitz family bought the castle and held it for 250 years, remodelling it in 1525 and 1611. Their reinforced walls proved their worth during the Thirty Years' War, when a Swedish siege of Czocha was thwarted.

In 1703 the castle passed to Jan Hartwig von Uechtritz, a courtier of Augustus II the Strong. On 17 August 1793 the whole complex burned. It stood derelict for decades afterwards: cataloguing the region's geography in 1847, the Upper Silesian writer Józef Lompa recorded it under its Polish name, Czocha, simply as a "ruined castle."

In 1909 the Dresden cigar manufacturer Ernst Gutschow bought Czocha for 1.5 million marks and commissioned the Berlin architect Bodo Ebhardt to rebuild it, working between 1912 and 1920 from a 1703 painting of the castle; the work destroyed many of the oldest surviving fragments, and the former moat was turned into a deer park. Gutschow, who kept close ties to the Russian imperial court and later bought valuable pieces from White émigrés fleeing the revolution, lived at Czocha until March 1945; accounts differ on whether he packed up his most valuable possessions and took them with him when he left, or left them behind.

An unproven tradition holds that the Abwehr, German military intelligence, ran a cipher school in the castle during the Second World War, though no evidence has been found to confirm it.

After the war the castle was ransacked repeatedly, first by Red Army soldiers and then by settlers arriving in the newly Polish territory, who carried off furniture and other goods. A widely repeated claim held that the greatest theft came on 1 February 1946, when Leśna's mayor, Kazimierz Lech, and the castle's librarian, Krystyna von Saurma, uncovered a hidden store of its collection — said to include Romanov coronation regalia, sixty busts of Russian tsars, about a hundred icons, porcelain, jewellery and paintings — and trucked it into the American occupation zone; the claim was later disproved, the icons having in fact gone to a reclamation depot in Jelenia Góra and on to Warsaw.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s the castle briefly sheltered refugees from the Greek Civil War, who kept livestock in its great hall. From 1952 the Polish Army ran it as a military holiday home and struck it from official maps; it did not reopen to the public until September 1996, when it began operating as a hotel and conference centre.