Červená Lhota

Červená Lhota Castle in Červená Lhota, Czechia, is an island castle that developed from a medieval stronghold into a Renaissance residence built and used by Bohemian noble families. The site first appears in written land records in 1465, and an earlier Gothic fortress is believed to have stood here from around the mid-1300s. The castle acquired its Renaissance character during rebuilding in the sixteenth century and played a continuous role in the regional estate economy and noble household life for several centuries.

A knightly family named Káb of Rybňan took ownership around 1530 and carried out major rebuilding work, with a period of Renaissance remodelling between 1542 and 1555 that produced the arrangement later known as Nová Lhota, or “New Lhota.” In 1597 Vilém Růt of Dírná bought the property and had the exterior coated in red plaster; the vivid roof tiles applied at that time led the place to be called Červená Lhota, meaning “Red Lhota.” After the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, a decisive conflict that reshaped Bohemian noble landholding, the Růt family’s last member, Bohuslav, left the country as an Utraquist and ownership passed to new hands.

In 1621 Antonio Bruccio took up residence; following his death around 1638–1639 the castle ceased to be a regular family seat and was used intermittently as a country cottage by his successors. The estate changed ownership several times in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Vilém Slavat of Chlum and Košumberk acquired it in 1641, later it was held by the Windisch-Graetz family, and it passed in 1755 to the Barons of Gudenus. After that sale, Baron Franz de Paul of Gudenus began new building work, but a great fire in 1774 destroyed most of the agricultural outbuildings on the estate.

Baron Ignác Stillfried became owner in 1776 and from 1796 lodged the composer Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf at the estate. Sales in the nineteenth century brought the property to Jakub Veith in 1820 and then, via his daughter, in 1835 to the Schönburg‑Hartenstein family, who retained it into the twentieth century. Owners in the mid-1800s added Romantic neo-Gothic features, including a tower and altered gables. Between 1903 and 1913 those neo-Gothic elements were removed and the building was reshaped into the Neo‑Renaissance form that stands today.

Josef Alexander von Schönburg‑Hartenstein died in 1937 and was buried in a newly constructed tomb, avoiding the upheavals that followed. After the Second World War the castle was confiscated by the state and its use changed: around 1946 it served as a children’s clinic. The property was placed under a national cultural commission in 1947 and opened to the public as a cultural site in 1949. It is now protected as a national cultural monument under the care of the state heritage authority.