Zprávy památkové péče 2014, 74(4):283-292

Quandaries over artistic materials confiscated from the property of the former Austro-Hungarian royal family

Kristina Uhlíková

Under the provisions of the peace treaties concluded after the First World War with Austria and Hungary, the newly created Czechoslovak state gained the property within its territory that had previously belonged to the Habsburg-Lorraine royal family. The nationalization of the Habsburg-Lorraine property included, in addition to vast tracts of land, a number of historic mansions, 17 country houses (chateaux), and one castle. In Bohemia, these were primarily the castles of Brandýs nad Labem, Chlum u Třeboně, Koleč, Konopiště, Ostrov nad Ohří, Ploskovice, Přerov nad Labem, Smiřice, and Zákupy, in Moravia they were Ivanovice na Hané, Hodonín a Židlochovice, in Silesia it was Frýdek, while in Slovakia they were Holič, Skýcov, Šaštín, Topolčianky, the Vígľaš castle, and the Bratislava palace of Archduke Frederick.
The imperial estates were placed under the supervision of the Ministry of Agriculture. Later an independent Central Directorate of State Forests and Estates was established, as part of the Ministry of Agriculture, to manage the administration mostly of the parts of the state ownership of land that these estates formed the basis of. This Central Directorate fell under the administration of the regional directorate, while larger related land properties (former large estates) were managed by their own administrations which made up the lowest instance of the new State Forests and Estates body. In most cases, the headquarters of these regional directorates and their administrations were located in these confiscated castles. The lowest instance of this state enterprise was exclusively responsible for the immediate maintenance of the castle buildings, parks, and mobiliary, while any substantial decisions concerning the repair of buildings and (especially) movements of the furnishings fell under the competence of the construction department of the Prague headquarters. The castle mobiliary was also monitored by Deputy General Directors of the State Forests and Estates. The inventory committee, set up in 1919, divided the internal furnishings of the castles into three groups: normal furniture designated for administrative offices, representative furnishings usable for embassies and other official facilities, and valuable items of an art-historical or scientific nature that, as state cultural property, was to pass into the competence of the public education department of the Ministry of Education. At the turn of the 1920's and 30's, this department, headed virtually throughout the entire First Republic by the art historian Zdeněk Wirth, organized a professional inventory of this most valuable group of furnishings through the efforts of the director of the East Slovak Museum in Košice, Josef Polák. At the same time, this public education department prepared the concept for exhibitions in the castles of Konopiště and Ploskovice, in which the most interesting collections of the nationalized castle buildings were to be presented to the public in cooperation with State Forests and Estates.
Even though these appointed institutions dealt with the challenge of how to secure and make use of the former Habsburg-Lorraine castles in a responsible manner, there is a certain element of quandary evident in all the documentation. The result of this was a mere minimal utilization of the cultural potential that these buildings had.

Keywords: Habsburg-Lorraine castles; history of heritage care; first Czechoslovak Republic; Josef Polák; Konopiště

Published: December 1, 2014  Show citation