Špilberk Castle
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Špilberk Castle (derived from the German: Spielberg) is an old castle on the hilltop in Brno, Southern Moravia.
From a major royal castle - established around the mid-13th century - and the seat of the Moravian margraves in the mid-14th century, it gradually turned into a huge baroque fortress, the heaviest prison in the Austro-Hungarian empire and then the barracks.
A prison had always constituted part of the Špilberk fortress. In 1620, after losing The Battle of White Mountain on November 8, the leading Moravian members of the anti-Habsburg "insurrection" were imprisoned in Špilberk for several years.
Franz Freiherr von der Trenck, (born 1711), Austrian soldier and one of the most controversial persons of the period was also jailed and died there on October 4, 1749.
Later, apart from several significant French revolutionaries captured during the coalition wars with France (the most known being Jean Baptiste Drouet, famous as the former postmaster of Saint-Menehould who had arrested King Louis XVI), a group of fifteen Hungarian Jacobins led by the writer Ferenc Kazinczy was especially noteworthy. Then, more than a quarter of a century later (from 1822), specially constructed cells for "state prisoners" in the northern wing of the former fortress were filled with the Italian patriots (Carbonari) who had fought for the unification, freedom and independence of their country. The poet Silvio Pellico, who served a full eight years there, made the Špilberk prison famous all over Europe with his book "Le miei prigioni - My prisons".
The last large "national" group of political prisoners at Špilberk consisted of nearly 200 Polish revolutionaries, mostly participants in the Kraków Uprising of 1846.
The Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph dissolved the Špilberk prison in 1855, and after departure of the last prisoners three years later, its premises were converted into barracks and they remained such for the next hundred years.
Špilberk entered public consciousness as a centre of tribulation and oppression on two more occasions: for the first time, during the First World War when - together with military prisoners - civilian objectors to the Austro-Hungarian regime were imprisoned there; and for the second time - far worse - in the first year of the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia.
Several thousands Czech patriots suffered in Špilberk at that time, some of whom were put to deaths there. For the majority of them, however, Špilberk was only a station on their way to other German prisons and concentration camps. In 1939-41, the German army and Gestapo carried out extensive reconstruction at Špilberk in order to turn it into a model barracks in the spirit of the romantic historicism so beloved of German Third Reich ideology.
The Czechoslovak army left Špilberk in 1959, which marked a definite end to its military era. The following year, Špilberk became the seat of the Brno City Museum.
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