Karlštejn Castle

We took the train out of Prague on a grey Tuesday, partly to escape the Old Town crowds and partly because Lia had seen a photograph of Karlštejn and refused to leave the country without standing under it. Forty minutes southwest of the capital, the train spat us out in a small valley village on the Berounka river, and there it was above us — a Gothic castle climbing the hillside in deliberate stages, tower above palace above gate, exactly as Charles IV intended in 1348. He did not build it to live in. He built it as a vault.

Walking up to it

The approach is a long cobbled lane through the village, and I will be honest: it is lined with the full inventory of Czech tourist tat — marionettes, shot glasses, trdelník stalls pumping out cinnamon smoke, a man in a cape selling tickets to something. Lia bought a hot wine to defend herself against the cold and we trudged up regardless, because the castle keeps appearing between the rooftops, larger each time, until the lane bends and the whole fortress stands over you at once and the souvenir stalls stop mattering.

Charles IV — king of Bohemia, Holy Roman Emperor, the man who built half of medieval Prague — designed Karlštejn to hold the imperial crown jewels and his enormous collection of holy relics. The whole hill is essentially the architecture of safekeeping: each level harder to reach than the last, the most sacred chamber set highest and deepest inside the Great Tower.

The chapel you probably won’t get into

The thing everyone wants to see is the Chapel of the Holy Cross in the Great Tower, its walls set with more than two thousand polished semi-precious stones and a ceiling meant to imitate the night sky. Here is my dry piece of advice, learned the hard way: that chapel is on a separate, limited tour (Tour Route II) that runs only part of the year and books out, and we had cheerfully turned up with tickets for the standard route instead. So I have not, in fact, stood inside the famous chapel. I have stood in the corridor of disappointed people who also did not book ahead. Learn from me. Reserve Route II online, weeks out, if the chapel is the reason you are coming.

The standard tour is still worth it — the imperial apartments, the Audience Hall, the dim stone stairwells that smell of cold rock — and the guides deliver it with a brisk Bohemian deadpan I enjoyed enormously.

Afterwards we did not rush back to the train. We climbed the path on the far side of the valley to a viewpoint where the whole castle composes itself against the woods, ate cold sausage and bread sitting on a wall, and watched a coach party shrink to nothing far below. Go on a weekday, go outside July and August, and give yourself the afternoon. Karlštejn rewards the people who linger after the day-trippers have caught the early train home.