Okoř

The ruin every Prague generation has sung about — a gothic castle of the 1350s on a rock in the Zákolanský brook valley, wrecked in the Thirty Years' War and left to romance since 1773.

Okoř is the Sunday-walk ruin of Prague: fifteen kilometres from the city, a tall gothic torso on a low rock ringed by the Zákolanský brook, and the subject of the campfire song every Czech can hum (“Na Okoř je cesta…”). The castle proper was built before 1359 by František Rokycanský, a rich burgher of Prague’s Old Town, over a 13th-century predecessor with an unusually fine chapel; the lords of Donín and the Martinic family enlarged it before the Thirty Years’ War broke it. When the Jesuits’ order was dissolved in 1773 the castle lost its last owner with a purpose and decayed fast into the silhouette that painters and trampers adopted. Open seasonally, with the village pubs below serving the walking crowds.