Hrad Špilberk
Castle · Czechia
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Špilberk Castle crowns Brno's skyline, built from the 13th century onward by Přemyslid kings and completed by King Ottokar II. Later transformed into a baroque citadel and the Austrian Empire's harshest prison, Stendhal featured it in *The Charterhouse of Parma*, it's now a museum in the city centre.
By the mid-14th century the castle had become the seat of the Moravian margraves, decades before it turned into anything resembling a prison. That transformation came later and slowly: the medieval seat grew into a huge baroque citadel, and only then into the prison the Austrian Empire feared, before ending its career as barracks. The dungeons were not a later addition bolted onto an existing fortress, they were part of Špilberk from an early stage. Stendhal's protagonist Fabrice del Dongo brings up those dungeons more than once in The Charterhouse of Parma, a detail drawn from the fortress's real notoriety.
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