Valdštejnská lodžie

Albrecht von Wallenstein's early-baroque garden pavilion outside Jičín (c. 1630), reached by his four-row lime avenue — the grand unfinished gesture of the duke's planned residence landscape.

The lodžie is the most tangible piece of Albrecht von Wallenstein’s enormous ambition for Jičín: an early-baroque loggia and honour courtyard built around 1630 as the garden pavilion of a planned ducal landscape that was to run in composed axes from the town to the Carthusian monastery at Valdice — his intended resting place, today a prison. The duke was assassinated in 1634 and the composition stopped mid-sentence, which is exactly its charm. The four-row lime avenue he planted still runs the 2 km from Jičín past the pavilion, and the Libosad park around it is freely open, with a cultural association running events in season.

For walkers it is the green way out of Jičín towards Zebín and Železnice — flat, shaded and straight as a ruler, because a duke wanted it that way.