Stoky Chateau Audio guide

A chateau in the center of the market town

Stoky Chateau stands right in the center of the market town, at an important crossroads leading to Jihlava, Dobronin, and Havlickuv Brod. Its location clearly shows that this was not an isolated noble residence, but the administrative and economic center of a wider estate.

From a medieval village to a Baroque residence

The first written mention of Stoky dates from 1278, when it was held by the Lichtenburg family. The chateau itself, however, was built much later, in 1760, at a time when more comfortable noble residences were replacing older fortified seats in the Bohemian countryside. Its owner at the time, Count Karl Josef of Palm, moved his residence here from Stritez.

Changes of ownership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

In 1840, the Palm family sold the estate to the Hohenzollerns. This brought Stoky into the property sphere of one of Europe's most important dynasties. The last noble owners were Prince Bedrich and King Carol of Romania, who donated the estate to the Czechoslovak state in 1933. Two years later it passed to the Stoky Forestry Cooperative, which operated here until it was nationalized and dissolved in 1959. After the cooperative was restored in January 1996, its headquarters returned to the chateau.

The chateau's present form mainly reflects the site's long administrative continuity. It is not a grand ceremonial palace, but a monument tied to the history of the estate, land administration, and changing patterns of ownership from feudalism through state administration to the modern cooperative movement.