Project

The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia forced the Liechtensteins to flee to their sovereign principality and, with their departure, almost seven centuries of stewardship and cultivation of the Lednice-Valtice landscape abruptly ended. (...)

The Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia forced the Liechtensteins to flee to their sovereign principality and, with their departure, almost seven centuries of stewardship and cultivation of the Lednice-Valtice landscape abruptly ended. With the advent of the postwar communist era, the chateaus and various follies like the neoclassical Colonnade, once considered the gateway into Moravia, were divided on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

When the Cold War ended, members of the preservation community within the Czech Republic called upon the World Monuments Fund to help take action and revive the endangered landscape. Intervention could not have come at a more important time. Preservation experts gathered at the 1993 WMF-sponsored charrette agreed that the Lednice and Valtice Cultural Landscape was “nothing less than the earliest and most extensive designed landscape surviving in Central Europe.” Through the efforts of this preservation movement, the constant sense of division and transformation that characterizes Lednice-Valtice’s history has been overcome by the unity and structure still imparted by the surviving architectural landscape.