Despite the peaceful separation of Slovakia from Bohemia and Moravia over ten years ago, these three regions will forever be stuck in the minds of many as Czechoslovakia. It is a word that has the ring of artifice to it, and so it is no surprise to learn that Czechoslovakia was a creation of the twentieth century, and met its own demise just a few years short of that century’s end. Famously described by Chamberlain as “a far-off land of which we know little”, the history and heritage of these lands are made more readily appreciable in “Great Country Houses of the Czech Republic and Slovakia”, by Lord Michael Pratt, son of the 5th Marquess Camden. The content is actually the excerpted first section of Pratt’s previous “Great Country Houses of Central Europe”, which the splendid Abbeville Press is now bringing out in three separate editions covering Hungary and Poland respectively, and, here, the oft-coupled Czech Republic and Slovakia.

We Anglos can perhaps be forgiven for not having already obtained an in-depth history of the region. (Ours in an age where a knowledge of the past is poorly valued). Pratt solves this quandary for us by providing a sizeable introduction to serve as a primer. In forty pages, the events of over a millennium are described, and somehow the reader completes it without feeling short-changed. It provides the solid foundation on which the rest of the book is built, for the history of these houses is the history of these lands, and vice-versa. The acknowledgments page alone reads like a Who’s Who of the great and good of Mitteleuropa: Kinsky, Lobkowicz, Thun-Hohenstein, and of course Schwarzenberg, among others. The book is a testament to the great heritage of these lands — unbroken, in many cases, for centuries until their entire civilization collapsed under the weight of the World Wars.

Some of the houses depicted in the book were already known to this reviewer, such as the splendid castle of Krummau (Cesky Krumlov) and the slightly-garish Schloß Frauenberg (Hluboká), architecturally a second-cousin (once-removed) of Windsor Castle. Many, however, were new discoveries, such as Valtice and Lednice.

Once the seat of the Liechtensteins, these two Moravian houses are an adjacent duo of the many residences of that powerful family whose eponymous principality is the last political remnant of the Holy Roman Empire. Here at Valtice (pictured above, from the book), Prince Karl Eusebius, the head of the Liechtenstein family from 1627 to 1684, founded the princely gallery which became one of the greatest collections of art in the world. His interest in the study of architecture was sufficient enough to merit writing a treatise on the subject, primarily for the edification of his son and heir, Johann Adam Andreas. This teaching bore fruit when Johann Adam Andreas succeeded his father, as the new prince purchased a Vienna palace from the Kaunitz family which he then redesigned, as well as building the substantial summer palace in Rossau, just outside the imperial city. (He had already built the many-columned chateau of Plumenau, with its striking hillside location, during his youth). The prince also added the works of Rubens and van Dyck to the princely collection.

The nineteenth century saw the rebirth of Valdice’s neighboring palace of Lednice. Towards the beginning of the century, the land between the two castles was turned into an ‘English garden’, a completely designed setting following a more naturalistic form than the more formal French-style gardens which had previously been the rage. The English theme was expanded when Prince Alois Josef II, in 1845, commissioned the architect Georg Wingelmüller to redesign Lednice, like the Schwarzenbergs’ Hluboka, along English Gothic lines.

Lednice and Valtice have thankfully been maintained in a sound condition, but not so the little chateau of Veltrusy. Sitting, somewhat dilapidated, on the road from Prague to Dresden, this was the seat of the Chotek family, from which sprang Sophie, the countess so beloved of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It was their double-assassination in Sarajevo, 1914, that sparked the beginning of the end of the old order. What one world war severely damaged, another killed off. With the Communist takeover of eastern and central Europe, the great landed estates of these ancient families were confiscated. The Liechtensteins had the wisdom to move the great art collection from Valdice to their own neutral Vaduz before the Red Army dropped the Iron Curtain dividing the continent. But chateaux are not transferable objects, and all the great houses which fell behind that Iron Curtain became property of the state.

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, a good many properties have been restored to their owners, but this restitution has sadly often been tainted by ethnic rivalries. Under the imperial crown of the Hapsburgs, Germans, Slavs, and Magyars lived amongst each other, in a complex and intertwined society. Post-communist governments have often proved less devoted to restoring properties to their rightful owners when those heirs are ethnic Germans than if they are of the dominant ethnicity in any of the numerous modern states. A house without its proprietary family is lacking an animating spirit. Sitting empty and under the keeping of the state, it can only be beloved by architects, tourists, and a handful of knowledgeable romantics. With a family, a great country house has a spirit, a heritage, and a living tradition to keep, maintain, and develop it through the ages. Furthermore, many of these noble families have for centuries been the embodiment of the pan-European ideal which the national governments of today purport to uphold. With the scholarly text of Michael Pratt and the graceful photographs of Gerhard Trumler, any student of history or art will appreciate, enjoy, and learn from this book, while perhaps mourning quite how fallen our once-great civilization has become and how far we are from recovering it.