Lipnice nad Sázavou Castle

Lipnice nad Sázavou Castle stands on a promontory above the rolling Vysočina highlands, about 100 kilometres southeast of Prague in one of the least-visited but most beautiful regions of the Czech Republic. The castle overlooks a quiet village and the wooded valleys of the upper Sázava River, far from the busy tourist routes that crowd the more famous Bohemian castles. For those willing to travel a little further, Lipnice rewards with a genuine sense of discovery — a Gothic ruin of considerable scale and architectural quality, set in a landscape that feels genuinely timeless.

The castle was founded around 1310 by the Lords of Lipnice, a noble family who controlled this part of Bohemia in the early 14th century. Through the 14th and 15th centuries the castle grew substantially, with the addition of the Great Tower (Velká věž) — one of the tallest surviving Gothic towers in Bohemia, measuring some 40 metres in height and still climbable today. In the 15th century the castle passed to the Trčka of Lípa family, powerful Bohemian nobles who extended and modernised the castle during the Renaissance period; the Trčka Palace, partially preserved within the ruins, dates from this period. The castle was badly damaged during the Thirty Years' War in the early 17th century and was largely abandoned thereafter, falling progressively into ruin.

The literary connection that makes Lipnice truly unique in the Czech castle landscape is its association with Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923), the Czech writer and satirist who created The Good Soldier Švejk — one of the greatest comic novels of the 20th century and an enduring masterpiece of anti-war literature. Hašek arrived in the village of Lipnice nad Sázavou in 1921, drawn by the cheap rent, the rural quiet, and reportedly the excellent local beer. He spent the last two years of his life here, writing the final chapters of Švejk in a village pub that still exists today as a small memorial museum. Hašek died in January 1923 in Lipnice, with the novel unfinished — the fourth volume was left incomplete at his death. The village has kept his memory carefully, and the pub where he wrote and drank is a place of pilgrimage for fans of Czech literature from across the world.

The combination of a serious Gothic ruin with a major literary connection and a setting far off the conventional tourist circuit makes Lipnice one of the most distinctive castle experiences in the Czech Republic. Visitors who read The Good Soldier Švejk before arriving will find the village and the surrounding landscape imbued with the particular anarchic, subversive humour that Hašek poured into his masterwork. The castle and the Hašek memorial together make a genuinely half-day or full-day excursion, and the surrounding Vysočina walking trails add a further dimension for those who want to spend more time in this quiet corner of Bohemia.