Zámek Blansko

The building began as a 14th-century Gothic stronghold on the site of an earlier bishop's fort, then took its present Renaissance shape between 1574 and 1604 under the Moravian land procurator Matyas Zalkovsky ze Zalkovic and his son Jan. Swedish troops wrecked it during the Thirty Years' War, a later owner named Kaspar Lev z Rozmitalu restored it, and the Gellhorn family gave it a Baroque refit before selling the heavily indebted estate to the Salm-Reifferscheidt family in 1766. Under the Salms, Blansko grew into one of Moravia's biggest ironworking centres, and the family remodelled the castle itself in neo-Renaissance style in 1870, the last building work it saw before passing out of their hands in 1945. One of the ironworks' company doctors used his free hours to map the region's then-unexplored caves, laying groundwork for what became Moravian speleology. The town has run its regional museum inside the castle since 1969, tracing the history of Blansko and the wider Moravian Karst region.