Trosky Castle

Trosky is one of the most recognisable silhouettes in the Czech Republic: two towers perched on two separate volcanic plugs, rising abruptly out of the farmland of the Bohemian Paradise in the Liberec Region. The plugs are the hardened throats of an ancient volcano that pushed up through the surrounding sandstones. On the lower one, 47 metres high, stands Baba, the Old Woman, a hexagonal tower; on the higher, 57 metres, stands Panna, the Maiden, a square one. The castle was founded in the second half of the 14th century by Čeněk of Wartenberg, who built a tower on each rock, residential buildings between them and three rings of walls. Its name simply means ruins, or debris.

In the 15th century Trosky was a Catholic stronghold during the Hussite Wars and was never taken by the Hussites, although it burned in 1428 and was besieged by the Taborites. From 1438 a robber knight, Kryštof Šov of Helfenburg, used it as a base to terrorise the surrounding countryside until the towns of the Lusatian League defeated him in 1444. King George of Poděbrady's army took the castle in 1469. Over the following century it lost its role as a noble residence, passed to Albrecht von Wallenstein in 1622, and was burned by the imperial army in 1648, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, after which it stayed a ruin. In 1681 the Jesuit historian Bohuslav Balbín came to see it, in what is thought to be one of the first recorded trips made purely for historical research. In the 1840s the Aehrenthal family, in Romantic fashion, began a staircase to the top of Panna, but it was never finished.

The ruin has belonged to the Czech state since 1925 and is a national cultural monument managed by the National Heritage Institute; the upper part of the hill is also a protected natural monument. It is among the most visited castles in the country, with more than 100,000 visitors a year even before a 2025 video game, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, recreated the castle as it looked in 1403 and brought a new wave of interest. Visitors can climb Baba by a staircase built in 1999-2000 to a new steel viewing platform added in 2024, and the views from the hill, which at 511 metres is the highest point of its upland, take in the whole Bohemian Paradise.

Getting there

Trosky is in the municipality of Troskovice, about 10 km south of Semily and about 12 km from Jičín. A side road from Troskovice to the I/35 road ends at a car park below the castle, which is also the starting point for marked hiking trails, including the red Golden Trail of the Bohemian Paradise and routes from Rovensko pod Troskami. The nearest airport is Pardubice (PED), about 67 km away.