An hour South of Prague, in a small town, Benešov, now really an exurb of the capital, you can find this castle:
It’s called Konopiště.1 It was bought by the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1887, when he was a young man of 24, to make his home there. He had it renovated & in a couple of years it became, apparently, fit for the heir to the imperial throne, as he was about to become. The Archduke spent most of the 1890s going around the world as a big game hunter. Most animals you could see today in a famous zoo, at least the ones you could put a name to, he shot, big or small, & he brought many trophies with him, some of which one can still see in his castle; there’s also a shooting room in the castle, with moving targets—the young man loved shooting. This was a different time, supposedly he shot hundreds of thousands of beasts… Meanwhile, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was run by the longest-lived Kaiser, Franz Joseph. His only son, the crown prince, committed suicide at 30, in 1889, with his mistress. Franz Joseph’s brothers died, one executed in Mexico by a revolutionary firing squad—he had been Emperor Maximilian 1864-7, but founding a dynasty is a rather dangerous business—the other, Franz Ferdinand’s father, in 1896, after contracting typhus in the Jordan or Egypt. There was a third brother, but he was not a good Habsburg; he preferred men to women & refused to marry, eventually he was banished from Vienna for scandals & lived in Salzburg, a patron of the arts; yet he was had once been offered the hand of the Brazilian crown princess, which would again have spread Habsburg rule to the Americas. So Franz Ferdinand suddenly stood next in the line of succession. He married a woman not considered fit for the purple, so even if he had lived to ascend to rule, his heirs would not have inherited the throne. This woman died with him when he was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914, then the Great War started.
Just earlier the same month, June 1914, Franz Ferdinand received the visit of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II at Konopiště. The two countries waged war on Europe together.
The castle has been Czech property for a century now, since the Habsburgs lost the war, the empire, & their properties. It has an extensive park — forest, English park, a lake, a rose garden with beautiful pheasants & peacocks. They still organize hunts.
From the Slavic word for hemp, konopi, which apparently they used to grow there.