Old Meets New: Troja Château

Not taken by me. Because I can't fly.

Troja Château. From the ground.

No, I haven't made it to Italy yet. Nor France, nor even back to England. But when you visit Troja Château, you can imagine yourself in all of these places.

Yes, this is in Prague.

The Troja neighborhood of Prague is in the north of the city and is only about 3.5 square km (~1.3 square miles), but it's home to a solid number of worthwhile spots: the Prague Zoo and the city's Botanical Gardens are both in Troja. And, just across the street from the entrance to the zoo, is Troja Château.

The less impressive entrance.

Troja Château was built for the noble Sternberg family in the late 1600s and was modeled on Roman villas popular at the time. In 1922, the young nation of Czechoslovakia bought the chateau, and it's now owned and operated by the Prague City Gallery, where it functions as a public gardens/great house/art museum.

First, let's look at the gardens.

The formal gardens lie south of the building, overlooking the edge of the Vlatava river, and have a view of Prague Castle and St. Vitus' Cathedral on the hillside opposite.

Those are the spires in the distance.

The gardens feature a variety of flowers, ornamental hedges, statuary, and fountains. To the east of the main building is a large and precisely planted apple orchard. All of these spaces are free and open to the public. Walking around them on a fine day was quite a transporting experience, and there are plenty of nooks and crannies to explore, including some rather labyrinthine hedge maze-type layouts.

However, the most striking exterior element is the grand staircase the leads from the gardens to the second floor entrance. Depicting various figures from Greek mythology during the war with the Titans, it's really quite something. Unfortunately, when we visited, it was partly covered by scaffolding for restoration work, so I couldn't get any good pictures. Fortunately, it's already pretty well photographed.

"Welcome to our home--LOOK AT OUR STAIRCASE!"

If you pay admission to get inside the château, you will experience some truly stunning ceiling and wall frescoes, often using rather impressive trompe l'oeil effects.

It looked more realistic in person, I swear.

The apotheosis of this is one the second floor, in the Great Hall, where every inch of wall and ceiling space is covered in images--appropriately enough, it's often referred as "the Apotheosis of the Hapsburgs." Wait, what?

A little backstory is necessary to really understand what's going on here. Prague and the surrounding countryside was, in the late 1600s, part of the Vienna-based Hapsburg empire. The Hapsburgs, along with various other Christian European forces, fought the Turkish--and, importantly, Muslim-- Ottoman Empire off and on for about 300 years. (Ironically, the two empires were allies during World War I, and both were officially dissolved as a consequence of their defeat.) This struggle was seen as absolutely existential for what we think of as "Christendom"--though, it should always be noted, the Ottoman rulers were, generally, rather tolerant of different religious beliefs among their subjects. Christians and Jews couldn't aspire to the first rank of society and had certain taxes or burdens placed on them, but there were neither purges nor forcible conversions, and most non-Muslims had a much easier time under the Ottomans than non-Catholics did in much of Western Europe. Regardless of the reality, however, the Ottoman threat was portrayed as a religious struggle, and when, in 1683, the Hapsburgs and their allies were able to relieve the besieged imperial capital of Vienna and strike a serious blow to the Ottoman forces, the Hapsburgs were seen as the saviors of Europe and Christianity itself. Count Sternberg, who happened to be building a château 300 some kilometers northwest in Prague, decided that, the centerpiece of his elaborately decorated home, should be a tribute to Christianity and the Hapsburgs as defenders and paragons thereof.

BOW DOWN TO THE HAPSBURGS!!!

Back to the art itself. What's perhaps most striking is how the artists--a Jewish father/son team named Abraham and Isaac Godin--exploited the architecture of the room. The walls curve inwards as they approach the ceiling, allowing the artists to create fairly convincing depictions of three dimensional space using foreshortening and perspective tricks, such as the foot in the image above, or the falling Ottoman in the one below.

They even gave him a shadow to heighten the effect.

Believe it or not, this pictures show parts of three walls and the ceiling.

The walls curve inward toward the ceiling starting just above the windows. Cool, right?

To be honest, the room itself is so decorated, so filled with detail and meaning, as to be overwhelming. But, when I was able to block out the general busy-ness of the whole scene and focus just on one small area, I was always amazed at the artistry and skill that went into creating the room.

That said, some of the other frescoes are, well, goofier. For example, in one of the Chinese themed rooms (there was a craze for chinoiserie  in the 18th century--think Wedgwood china and black lacquer cabinets), the artist decided to add an image of a monkey eating an orange. Judging by the painting, he'd never seen a monkey, because, well...

G'AH!

As I said above, however, the château also serves as an art museum, often showing displays of modern modern or recent Czech art. When my friends and I visited, they were featuring a retrospective of works by the Franco-Czech sculptor Vladimír Škoda. Škoda works mainly with metal, often making spheres, and he has long been fascinated by the works of famous astronomer (and one-time Prague resident) Johannes Kepler, who discovered the elliptical orbits the planets of the solar system, one of his three Laws of Planetary Motion. He also believed in the ancient idea of the "music of the spheres," that there was a harmonic resonance present in the planets and their relationships to one another. This idea--in Latin, Harmonices Mundi--provided the name for a work by Kepler and the inspiration and title of the Škoda exhibit.

Large-ish metal spheres.

Thousands of small metal spheres.

Metal spheres with markings indicating the five Platonic solids.

I won't claim to have *understood* Škoda's intent--or whether there even was a greater intent that "Aren't metal spheres cool?!"--but the juxtaposition of the extremely modern, minimalist spheres and the extremely Baroque, Rococo frescoes was certainly an intriguing one.

My museum companions contemplating the art.

I'll admit that Troja Château wasn't even on my radar until quite recently, and most expats I mention it to have never heard of it, let alone visited it, which is a real shame. Its combination of gardens, historical site, and modern museum, is utterly unique in my experience. It's definitely worth taking the short trip to Troja for. And hey, if you want, you can swing by the zoo and say hello to the animals and make it a full day. Or just grab an iced cream and enjoy the beauty.


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