Prague - Veleslavín Castle

Veleslavínská Court No. 1 was for centuries the centre and part of the village of Veleslavín, the estate of the Břevnov Monastery. It was first mentioned in writing in a falsity of the foundation document dating back to 993. The Benedictines rented it as an ash yard.

In 1420, after the Hussite attack, the Prague citizens took control of the village and it remained in the possession of various burgesses until the 16th century, when it fell to the Prague purkrabstvo. In the 18th century the administration passed to the provincial estates.

The Baroque chateau was built in the second quarter of the 18th century, probably between 1730 and 1750. The owner of the estate was Empress Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, mother of Maria Theresa. Kilián Ignác Dientzenhofer, who served as the architect of the Imperial Building Office at Prague Castle at the time, is mentioned as the architect. However, the authorship is not directly documented.

The castle originally formed the northeast corner of a rectangular courtyard surrounded by farm buildings, of which only the southern part remains today. The castle included a Baroque garden, which, in connection with the neo-Baroque modifications of the castle at the end of the 19th century, was given a neo-Croatian conception.

In the 1870s and 1880s the courtyard with one of the pavilions was owned and occupied by the family of the landowner Leopold Dostal, at least from 1874, when the ownership is mentioned at the baptism of his son.

In the 1880s, Baroness Emilie Marie von Oesterén, née Fuchs (1851-1919), a German-Hungarian Jewess, purchased the mansion and occupied it with her son, the future writer Friedrich Werner von Oesterén (1874-1953), and his mistress. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was a recurring guest.

At the end of the 19th century the farm buildings were demolished.

In 1910, cousins Leo Kosák, MD (1874-1944) and Oskar Fischer, MD (1876-1942) bought the manor from Baroness von Oesterén. At the beginning of the 20th century (1912) the castle was extended with short neo-Baroque wings and a private sanatorium for nervous and pulmonary diseases was established there. The sanatorium had 60 beds, two more doctors and almost two dozen nurses.

Charlotte Garrigue-Masaryk was treated there, Milena Jesenská was treated for morphine addiction and the architect Adolf Loos was cured of syphilis.

The adjacent 13.17 hectares of land became the property of the City of Prague after the land reform.

On 21 March 1939 MUDr. Oskar Fischer transferred his half of the castle to his wife, who was not Jewish. In the summer of 1941, MUDr. Kosák and MUDr. Fischer were arrested by the Gestapo and forced to conclude an unfavourable contract for the sale of the sanatorium premises. The entire building was transferred to the "Expulsion Fund for Bohemia and Moravia" (Auswanderungsfond für Böhmen und Mähren), which paid for the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. After his deportation to the Terezín ghetto, Oskar Fischer died in February 1942, and Leo Kosák perished in Auschwitz in October 1944.

In 1946, Leo Kosák's son Viktor Kosák (1911-1993) asked for the return of part of his property. His request was denied and the entire building was forfeited to the Czechoslovak state in 1951. The premises then housed the state pneumology clinic, which was relocated to the Motol Hospital after 1989.

Since the late 1990s, the chateau continued to serve medical purposes, when it housed a private clinic.

The complex consists of six brick buildings.

Chateau No. 1 (plot No. 138) is a three-winged building with two floors above ground with an attic and a basement. The central part of the building is Baroque, the side wings are Neo-Baroque.

The gatehouse No. 140 is a two-storey building to the left of the Baroque entrance gate.

The west pavilion of No. 84 is a two-storey building with traces of stucco decoration on the west facade, completely derelict in 2023 but with a new roof.

East Pavilion No 139 is a Baroque two-storey building with a turret.

The barn (Plot No. 140) is a single storey building with a gabled roof.

The whole castle grounds are surrounded by a wall with two gates and a pedestrian gate made of rubble brickwork, sometimes interspersed with bricks. It is in a poor state of repair, with broken sections temporarily secured with barbed wire in several places.

The park has several dozen mature deciduous trees, shrubs and the original network of paths from the sanatorium era, covered in places with asphalt.

The castle grounds, in a considerably dilapidated state, are currently owned by the Office for State Representation in Property Matters.