Mnichovo Hradiště Castle

Mnichovo Hradiště Castle in Mnichovo Hradiště, Czechia, is a noble residence first erected around 1602–1606 by the Bohemian councillor Václav Budovec z Budova. Built at the end of the Renaissance period and later transformed in the High Baroque manner, the site became tied to major political events at the opening of the Thirty Years’ War because Budovec was one of the leaders of the Bohemian estates that rose against Habsburg rule.

The castle’s first phase, the early 1600s construction, reflects its origin as the seat of a leading figure of the Bohemian estates. After the estates suffered defeat at the Battle of White Mountain, Budovec was executed. In 1623 ownership passed to the imperial general Albrecht von Wallenstein, and four years later Wallenstein sold the lordship and its rights to his cousin Maximilian von Waldstein. Maximilian kept the property after Wallenstein’s death in 1634 and increased the estate by buying neighbouring lands; the Waldstein family continued as lords of Mnichovo Hradiště until 1945.

A new building campaign began under Ernst Josef von Waldstein from about 1690, shifting the castle from its earlier form into a large High Baroque complex. During this period a Capuchin convent and the adjacent Church of the Three Kings were erected and consecrated in 1699, the convent following the order’s plain, mission-focused approach to design. The main ensemble of Baroque construction reached completion between about 1710 and 1712.

In 1723–1724 Countess Marie Margarete von Waldstein had a chapel dedicated to St. Anne added beside the convent church as an act of thanksgiving after surviving a plague outbreak. Decades later, after the Carthusian monastery at Walditz was secularized, the bones of Wallenstein and his first wife Lucrezia were moved into that St. Anne chapel in 1782; the general’s remains are reported as being housed there from 1785. Wallenstein’s tomb within the chapel bears a Latin inscription, Quid lucidius sole? Et hic deficiet, rendered in English as “What is brighter than the sun? And even it yields to darkness.”

The castle’s cultural holdings moved and grew over time. A family library, originally founded in the later 1600s at Duchcov by Johann Friedrich von Waldstein, was transferred to Mnichovo Hradiště in 1921. In the twentieth century a modern grave slab for the general’s crypt was carved in 1933 by the Czech sculptor Karel Kolaczek. From 1966 a lapidarium containing several dozen Baroque statuary pieces has been installed in the Capuchin church and the St. Anne chapel to preserve those sculptures.