Palatial Weekend

When Brno weekends roll around, everybody, and we do mean everybody, goes out of town. We joined the throng on Saturday morning and went out to the Valtice-Lednice region last weekend, hopping a fast train to Breclav, where we boarded a little red 1955 Tatra diesel train to the little town of Lednice.

About the area: From 1222 up until 1945, a huge portion of Moravia was owned by the Liechtenstein family (they kept their estates at 99--at 100 they would have had to raise a standing army for the Holy Roman Emperor), several of whom considered themselves quite the artists and gardeners. Over a few hundred years, mostly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they (okay, their standing army of muddy serfs) built and rebuilt two pretty major chateaux about 10 km apart--one at Valtice and a summer place at Lednice, with many follies, including triumphal arches, hunting lodges, chapels, a fake-ruined castle, an aqueduct, an “inferno” scattered over the landscape.

We started by touring parts of Lednice’s extensive grounds. The Lednice people were really into landscape architecture, and kept the local peasantry busy making and remaking the grounds--dredging lakes, building islands, typical nineteenth-century stuff. They also built our favorite folly, 60 meter high minaret (the largest outside of the Muslim world, go figure).

From the outside, the chateau at Lednice was a conglomeration of a chapel, a huge greenhouse, a neo-gothic palace and a more traditional-looking building that now seemed to house the people who worked there. And it was hopping. The chapel was churning out weddings literally by the hour. Here’s the best one we saw: a wedding party dressed entirely in “period” costumes ranging from medieval wench to Elizabethan guy with full-on ruff, white tights, and black velvet beret to Empire-style gowns.

Like the wedding party, the Liechtensteins weren’t overly concerned with period accuracy, just with looking good. The neo-Gothic interiors were immaculate and filled with beautiful original furniture, armor (both faux and the real Venetian thing), paintings, chandeliers, and wall-coverings (fabric and paper, some of it beautiful hand-painted Chinese paper from their obligatory Orientalist phase). Lednice’s most distinctive feature, though, was the totally gorgeous carved wood that dominated the interiors—a free-standing spiral staircase in one room, incredible cassette ceilings throughout.

The next day we walked on one of the Czech footpaths to Valtice, finding follies along the way. The Czech countryside is woven together by such pathways, each colored coded and carefully blazed. You can buy cool regional maps that show the trails, some more appropriate for bikes, others for hiking. The main point: it's absolutely fun, EVERYBODY seems to use these trails, and it unlocks the mystery of how the Czechs drink so much beer, eat so many sweets, and still manage to look fabulous in their bathing suits.

In contrast to the little village of Lednice, Valtice was an actual town with a huge church and market square all dominated by the classically imposing chateau. Cobbled streets led up to and into the courtyard; it was easy to imagine the nobles driving up in their carriages—and after all, they were doing that until the end of World War II. Nothing like a little collaboration with the Nazis. As a result, things here again were in excellent shape—so good, in fact, that we could even walk on the parquet floors (In a very Czech touch, they did provide us with slippers (the ubiquitous bačkory) that we could slip on over our shoes for the tour.)

Valtice was super-Baroque, full of allegorical ceiling paintings, some great hidden bathrooms and a few pieces of exquisite furniture. Its crowning glory was its chapel, a full-on Baroque extravaganza that made the glories of Lednice’s carved wood seem subtle and understated. We joined the returning throngs (standing room only on the train home from Valtice) of weekended Brnonians, already making plans for the next Moravian excursion.