Gardens and Castle at Kroměříž

Kroměříž Castle was built in the second half of the 17^th century on the location of a previous Gothic-Renaissance residence of bishops of Olomouc, destroyed in 1643 by the Swedish army. The construction was based on a design by the Imperial court architects Filiberto Lucchese and Giovanni Pietro Tencalla, who also designed two representative gardens. The castle’s appearance has been largely preserved from the 17^th century to this day. In 1848 and 1849, the Imperial Diet met at the Castle for the purpose of creating a new constitution for the Austrian Empire, but it was dissolved by Emperor Franz Joseph.

The Castle has the shape of a four-wing building, with a Medieval square tower – the remains of the previous bishops’ castle – integrated into it. The façade is broken up by a row of tall pilasters stretching across all floors and giving the building a monumental appearance. The original interior decorations were destroyed in a fire in 1752 and later rebuilt in Rococo style. The most interesting part is the Parliament Hall, with its 400 m² of ceiling paintings, and the Liege Hall, with its trompe-l'œil painting, in which the bishops of Olomouc, as worldly feudal lords, tried their vassals (lieges) and organised liege parliaments. The castle also contains a famous art gallery containing, after the National Gallery, the second most significant collection of paintings in the Czech Republic. It houses works of foremost European painters from between the 15^th to the 18^th century, including Titian, Lucas Cranach the Elder, Paolo Veronese and Anthony van Dyck.

The castle’s true pride are its famous gardens. The Castle Garden, accessed through a richly decorated sala terrena, was turned in the late 18^th and the first half of the 19^th century into an English landscape park. On the other hand, the Flower Garden (also known as Libosad), located 800 metres away from the Castle, has largely preserved its appearance from the time it was designed, 1665–1675, and thus represents an exceptionally well-preserved example of a Baroque castle garden. The original entrance from the northwest led through the generously designed, 244-metre long colonnade, whose roof also served as a sightseeing terrace. The northern part of the complex is symmetrically divided into four square fields with geometrically clipped greenery, often shaped into complicated labyrinths and various coloured images. The centrally located garden pavilion called Rotunda dominates over the whole composition. The southern part of the garden contains a picturesque aviary, swimming pools and the so-called strawberry hills, artificial hills with a spiral hedgerow. The youngest part of the complex is the Classicist cour d'honneur with the management building and large greenhouses dating from between 1840 and 1845, today serving as the entrance.