70 Kilometres south of Prague, in the heart of old Bohemia, lies the castle Cerveny Hradek.

Červený Hrádek castle, gate
Červený Hrádek castle, rosegarden
Červený Hrádek castle, ceiling of small salon

Cerveny Hradek is a highly sought Location for Civil Weddings.

After 4 months in prison, he managed to escape and was reunited with Henriette in Austria. Having lost all their material goods, the young couple decided to leave ‘the old world’ and boarded a ship to New York, where Mucki started working as a car Mechanic while Henriette served as a Maid in a rich family’s house. In 1960 Mucki was send to Switzerland by his then employer, to represent his company there. After a very successful Management Buy Out, many years later, Mucki had managed to be the only exile Aristocrat from Czechia who returned much wealthier than he had been when he had fled his home decades before. Thanks to Havel’s “restitution”, Mucki had his old home returned to him- now a run-down shadow of its former splendour. As Mucki and Henriette didn’t have any children of their own, they invested considerable amounts of money in the rebuilding of the Mladota family seat. Then they generously decided to name one of the children of their good friends Johannes and Johanna Lobkowicz as their heir, in the hope they would honour their memory. After Henriette’ death in 2011, Nikolaus Lobkowicz became the new owner of Cerveny Hradek, and he has been living there with his wife Theresa and their 8 children since 2014.

Fairytale castle in Bohemia

The first official mention of Cerveny Hradek (then called “Podhradec”) dates back as long as to 1285, and it has seen many generations of various noble families come and go, amongst them also the Lobkowicz Family, one of the most significant noble Houses of the land. The family that prevailed longest, however, were the Barons Mladota. This ancient and valiant warrior clan, that proudly bore the title “Gate Keepers of the Bohemian Kingdom”, had come in the possession of Cerveny Hradek after the terrible thirty year's war. The last of this old line, Jan “Mucki” Baron de Mladota, had only just married his beautiful young wife Henriette when the second World War ended in 1945, during which parts of the Castle were temporarily confiscated by the occupying Nazi Invaders, when he became an outspoken opponent to newly established communist movement. Mladota, a passionate Czech patriot and Co-Signer of the Declaration of Czech Noblemen in favour of the Czech Republic, was therefore imprisoned in 1948 when the communists took power in “Czechoslovakia”, while his wife Henriette fled to Austria. They disowned Mucki, and declared him an enemy of the state.

Cerveny Hradek View from Castle into garden

One curiosity of Cerveny Hradek lies therein that Mucki’s parents had sponsored the studies of a young Architect, Jan Kotera, who would later become one of the most famous modernists in Europe. As a way of giving thanks to his sponsors, Kotera planned and supervised several structural changes in and on the Castle- amongst them the pointy towers that give the place its current fairy tale flair. Rumor has it that Kotera was so embarrassed by what he dismissively called his “early ventures into romanticism” that insisted on this not ever being presented in any of the official catalogues of his many works.

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