A European Castle Call

Snow White's wicked stepmother could have lived in Loket Castle, which is still clad in its medieval vestments—eighteenth-century rulers in Central Europe had a proclivity for "modernizing" these strongholds of the Middle Ages into pastel-colored neoclassic palaces, but fortunately, Loket was overlooked by the redecorating team. The castle's thick conical turrets topped by pointy witch hat–like roofs are, depending on one's perspective, either straight out of a fairy tale or symbols of oppression. Or perhaps both.

We park the Solstice and wander up to the castle, passing the hotel Bily Kun, where Goethe celebrated a birthday, and eventually find ourselves in the castle dungeon. Here, animatronic mannequins clad in period clothing are eternally locked in a hyperbolic reenactment of medieval torture—aided by piped-in screams and howls. My favorite is the poor soul getting his eyes gouged out with a hot poker.

The next castle on the list is in Becov nad Teplou, and we drive right up to the mauve-and-white castle-cum-palace's wrought-iron gate before being waved off by a man in a tuxedo. It's Saturday, which means that nearly every castle in the country is going to be the site of a wedding. A castle's potent symbol of power and the storybook connotations make it an attractive place to tie the proverbial knot, but for Czechs the allure is more about what it's not: a church. The pope sent crusading armies into Bohemia (the western half of the Czech Republic) to quash a reform movement in the fifteenth century, and the Austrian Hapsburgs successfully re-Catholicized the Czech lands in the 1600s with a precision that would have made Stalin shiver and shut his history book. Add to this 41 years of Communist slogans about religion being the opiate of the people and it's not much of a surprise that this is one of the most secular nations on the planet. In the 2001 census, 58 percent of Czechs ticked "atheist" for their religious affiliation.

We veer off Castle Road and onto Route 201. The two-laner is flanked by fields of bright poppies until we come out into a small forest and along a patchwork valley of woodlands, hayfields, grasslands, and a sprinkling of terra-cotta-roofed houses. An avenue of poplars becomes the approach to a bright-red monastery, its cupola shining gold in the sun. A few listless villages and several descending hairpin turns later, Krivoklat Castle, with its dominating white turret, sits in front of us. A wedding—of course—prevents us from doing anything but stopping long enough to snap a few photos.

We pass under the E48 superhighway, which could get us to Prague in minutes, and remain on the slow road, not just because of the giant limestone cliffs following the Berounka River—the banks of which are populated with sun-soaked Czechs—but also because our next stop, the penultimate castle on our three-day trip, is considered the most dramatic. If Karlstejn Castle appears more impenetrable than Fort Knox, there's a good reason: Set on a mountaintop, with jagged walls and turreted lookout towers, the castle is a showcase for a tall bone-white edifice where Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, kept the crown jewels. It's not surprising that a popular Czech TV show declared Charles to be "the greatest Czech." During his fourteenth-century reign, Prague grew to be the second-largest city on the Continent (after Rome) and, more important, was for the first time in its history a political and cultural center of Europe.