Vilemov Castle

Vilemov Castle

"And Professor Reisky liked swing, traditional jazz. And he ordered this kind of music, and he asked me for a dance. I was a little bit shocked, because the baron, the owner of the castle, was asking me!"

As she stands in the middle of the ballroom of Vilemov Castle in eastern Bohemia, Vladimira Rubenstein reflects on the evening when she met the castle's owner, the late Professor Vladimir Reisky, in that same place...

"We were dancing, and it was fantastic. He spoke a lot, he was interested in who I was, what my name was. I told him I was Vladimira, and he replied "I'm Vladimir! That's fantastic! We have the same name! And it started, actually. And we became friends, and that is really the reason why I am here now."

After four years of friendship between Vladimira and Vladimir, Professor Reisky passed away last year, and Mrs Rubenstein became the new manager of Vilemov Castle. She is now continuing the work that the professor began after the castle was restituted to him in 1991. In 1948, Czechoslovakia's communist regime confiscated the property from the Reisky family, and Professor Reisky later fled the country for the United States, where he in time became a professor of political science at the University of Virginia.

When Vladimir Reisky returned to Czechoslovakia after the Velvet Revolution, he found Vilemov Castle in a terrible state of disrepair. During the communist period it had been used as Vilemov village's elementary school. A particular priority for Professor Reisky was to restore the castle's ballroom to its former glory, which the elementary school had turned into a gymnasium. Mrs Rubenstein describes the strange situation that Professor Reisky faced with his ballroom when he returned to the castle:

"He laughed when he told me that when the children left this building - because it used to be a school - their gym still wasn't finished in the new building. And they kept coming here for a year, or maybe more than a year, very regularly to do their exercises."

It didn't bother him too much?

"No, no, no. He was laughing, because he knew that they would finish exercising here, because their gym had to be built very, very quickly. So he knew that they would finish their business here and that he would remain alone, and that he would have time to rebuild it into a fantastic ballroom."

And when the children finally did leave, Professor Reisky embarked on a major restoration project that has made the various historical facets of the castle more apparent. The foundation of Vilemov Castle was originally that of a Benedectine monastery that was destroyed by the Hussites in 1421. A fortress was constructed there in 1578, and this was later remodelled into a Renaissance castle, whose style was changed to Baroque in 1746.

Indeed, some of the most precious jewels in the castle's crown are its Baroque features. Among them is the small salon, right across the hallway from the ballroom:

"Now we are entering the small salon. You can see nice frescoes, and we tried to restore them. So some parts are restored, but because this procedure is quite expensive and we didn't have enough money, you can see that the rest of the room is not restored. You can see nice paintings, coloured flowers."

It was not only the painted flowers in the small salon that were restored: the real flowers outside in the castle's garden also needed to be replanted. All of the estate had been neglected during communism, and the land around the castle had to be transformed into grounds befitting the beautifully restored buildings. Professor Reisky was very fond of nature, and he designed a garden and established a private park behind the castle which is now the home of a herd of deer:

"He liked nature very much, and he actually took care of his estate when he was young, before he emigrated actually. And he liked deer, he liked nature. So he established a private park behind the castle, and five or six years ago he bought six deer. And because they are very fertile, we now have forty deer. Forty! And you can see them behind the fence. They are fantastic."

Does anybody hunt them?

"Yes. We must shoot maybe twenty of them, because this is quite a small area, so we must shoot them. This is a terrible thing for me, because they are so nice."

Will we be eating them tonight?

"No, no. But I have some pieces in the refrigerator."

Another of Professor Reisky's passions was croquet, and one of the first things he created on the estate were croquet lawns. These are perhaps the first - and are definitely among the very few - croquet lawns in the Czech Republic:

"He decided to create croquet lawns, there are actually two croquet lawns. And everybody who came here was personally taught the rules of how to play croquet by Professor Reisky, because Czech people don't know what it is, and many foreigners also don't know how to play. And he liked it."

Guests can watch a game of croquet from the ballroom's terrace, which offers a view of the garden, park and some of the estate's other buildings, including an Italianate residence that was built under one of the castle's former owners, Count Caretto de Millesimo, Marquis of Savona. He purchased Vilemov Castle in 1684, but the Caretto family died out in 1852, and Vilemov passed to the nearest relative, Francis Baron Reisky de Dubnic.

Looking out from the terrace, there is one treasure from the Caretto period that you cannot see: underneath the terrace, sheltered in an arcade, is a statue of the Countess Caretto de Millesimo and her child:

"This is actually a gravestone of a mother and a child. And this gravestone is made from very soft material, actually from sand. This statue was actually in the park for many years, and it is very valuable. It comes from 1810, and the author is a very famous sculptor, Mr Prachner. The National Gallery was interested in having this sculpture somewhere in Prague, but it stayed here."

When you begin to consider that Professor Reisky paid 250,000 crowns to have the statute of the countess and her child restored, you may also start to think about the total cost of restoring and maintaining a castle such as Vilemov. Vilemov Castle is one of over two thousand castles in the Czech Republic - a country which has the highest density of castles in Europe - and the preservation and upkeep of such properties is important for the country's cultural heritage. I asked Mrs Rubenstein how the managers of Czech castles maintain these properties:

"Of course it's not simple to maintain the castle. It depends on the amount of money you have. Some families are of quite a good background, and this background comes from selling wood. This is the main income, I would say, for us as well. Some people have a lot of money from the past, some people are rich, and some people don't have enough money to take care of it. And if you have a historical building, then the Ministry of Culture - and this building is registered with the Ministry of Culture - can provide subsidies. And Professor Reisky was excellent in asking for subsidies: he knew from America how to ask for them. For example, last year and this year we restored the whole roof, and the Ministry of Culture gave us half of the money to restore the roof."

Vilemov Castle has also been able to finance itself by offering conference and bed and breakfast facilities. Because of his teaching career, Professor Reisky was also keen to have students come to Vilemov and use the castle as a space for learning. He established a Foundation for International Studies - a non-governmental, non-profit educational organization, which now brings international corporations and universities to the castle to discuss and study international affairs. This is indeed an interesting twist in the political history of Vilemov Castle, considering that it was taken over by the Nazis in 1942, and that Red Army troops stayed there in 1945.

While you can no longer see Red Army troops walking in the garden or Vilemov village children exercising in the ballroom, these days you will find students from all around the world in that same ballroom attending conferences and listening to seminars. In this, and in many other ways, Vilemov Castle is a living monument to the late Professor Reisky - a man who took back a communist-era school and restored it into his family castle, with the dreams and visions of a political scientist, nature lover, croquet player and, of course, a fan of swing...