Chateau Topolcianky

The village of Topolcianky, located at the foothill of the Tribec Mountains, boasts an extensive English garden, which features a picturesque and winsome Classicist-style chateau.

The area originally featured a Gothic-style water castle and later a Renaissance fortress. At the outset of the 19th century, the then owner of the castle Count Ján Keglevich pulled down the southern Renaissance tract of the castle, built and replaced it with a Classicist one, which is considered one of the purest and most beautiful examples of architecture in the Classicist style in Slovakia.

In the past, the chateau was used as a summer residence of the Habsburg Royal House. After World War I, it also served as a summer residence of Czechoslovak presidents. It was at that time that the chateau's three Renaissance-style wings underwent their latest thorough reconstruction. T. G. Masaryk, the first president of the Czechoslovak Republic, especially liked to relax and work in this place.

The Classicist tract was gradually turned into a museum. Today visitors can admire the library with more than 14,000 volumes, one of the few fully conserved castle/chateau libraries in Slovakia. The interior and valuable historical furniture from the 16th to 19th centuries with splendid ornamentation and collections of porcelain and ceramics (one of the biggest in Slovakia) also deserve the visitor's attention.

MUSEUM

The classicist wing of the chateau was restructured into a museum exhibiting historical furniture and household furnishings, such as pictures, period-style clocks, ceramics, carpets, embroidered oriental draperies and weapons. All of the movable property in the chateau is original as abandoned by the last aristocratic lords of the chateau and of the estate, specifically the Archduke Joseph August Habsburg with his wife the Archduchess Augusta, a granddaughter of the Emperor Franz Joseph I, when leaving the chateau in October 1918.

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