Historical study of interventions, its current state and pathologies, and a proposal for intervention. Veveří Castle

Abstract

Just 20 kilometers northeast of the city of Brno, a twist of the river Svratka where the creek empties into a lake, standing on a large rock promontory until recently one of the most damaged and neglected castles in Moravia, the Veveří Castle. It was abandoned for a long time, several times ruthlessly adapted, that was the end of the 20thcentury form of the once famous royal fortress, residence and later Moravian Margraves proud centre of one of the largest Moravian feudal estates. According to legend, the castle Veveří ("squirrel" in Czech) was founded by Přemyslid Duke Conrad of Brno in the middle of the 11th Century, then only as a hunting lodge. Nevertheless, the first credible recorded mention about the castle is from the years 1213 and 1222, when King Přemysl Otakar I used the fortified castle as a prison for rebellious peers. Initially, it was apparently a wooden residence situated near the church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary west of the present compound. In the 1220s a stone castle on the extremity of the rocky promontory behind a deep moat cut out of the rock started to grow. The so-called keep is the only structure which has remained well-preserved from this oldest building stage.