Czech Republic · 13th century
Litice Castle (German: Litiz) is a castle in the Záchlumí municipality in the Ústí nad Orlicí District in the Pardubice Region of the Czech Republic.
The town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, United States, was named after the castle by members of the Moravian Church.
The steep slopes of the foothills of the Orlické Mountains gave the advantage of a strategic position to the Gothic castles being founded there at the close of the 13th century. The high headland around which flowed the Divoká Orlice River was the site chosen just before the year 1300 by the Drslavic family to build up a castle which they named after their original family settlement in the Plzeň area. For a short span of time in the 14th century, the Litice castle was owned by two Luxembourg rulers successively, John of Bohemia and Charles IV. In 1371, Boček of Kunštát, a Moravian noble, came with his family to settle at the castle. One branch of the family became naturalized in Bohemia through marriage and the purchase of the Poděbrady and Pardubice estates.
The appearance of the oldest Gothic castle was lost under the extensive construction work launched in 1450 by George of Poděbrady, later King of Bohemia. The former gothic likeness can be distinguished only in the two-palace core of the castle, resembling similar architecture applied in the 14th century at Helfenberk and Menstein. The turbulent times following the Hussite Wars, rife with internal conflicts between alliances of the aristocrats fighting for power in the Kingdom of Bohemia, one of the strongest being the Utraquist party of George of Poděbrady, called for essential measures to safeguard this important castle.
The reign of George of Poděbrady from 1458 brought peace and quiet to Bohemia for a short time. This was interrupted in the mid 1460s by a war caused by the Papal Court instigating the resistance of the local catholic nobility and then asking Matthias Corvinus, the King of Hungary, to intervene.
This was the historical background to swift reconstruction of the castle and its fortifications. The atmosphere of the times and the prevalent bourgeois-aristocratic environment influenced the character of the architecture in the general concept of which the dying tradition of the 14th century can still be traced. This tradition was in conception and architecture practically outdated by 1450.
Text adapted from “Litice Castle” on Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Litice Castle ranks #3,865 of 9,035 worldwide in the atlas's castle fame ranking, and #107 of the 243 mapped in Czech Republic. Founded c. 1300, it is older than 60% of the atlas's dated landmarks, one of 1090 atlas entries founded in the 13th century. Its Wikipedia articles were opened 1,253 times in the last 60 days, more than 57% of the atlas. Wikidata records about 10,000 visitors in 2022. 8 more atlas landmarks stand within 25 km. The nearest day-trip guide is Pardubice, 41 km away. See how Czech Republic compares in the castle statistics.
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