Castle Cerveny Kamen

Červený Kameň is a Slovak castle that rises above the village of Častá on the southeastern slope of the Small Carpathians, not far from the wine-growing town of Modry, about 8 km west of Trnava.

 

In the middle of the 13th century, a stone castle stood on the site of today's castle, which was part of the border system of castles that stretched from Bratislava to Žilina. This original castle, which was perhaps founded by the daughter of the Hungarian king Béla III. Constance, which received the estate here as a dowry at the end of the 12th century, disappeared in the first half of the 16th century, when its then owners, the Augsburg businessmen Fuggers, built a new fortress around its perimeter in 1535–1537 with a central square courtyard and four corner bastions and extensive basement storage areas.

 

The foundation of the fortress was originally only the southwestern residential wing, in the basement of which there were extensive storage areas. The four low and wide bastions built to defend the fortress were built with the need for advanced artillery defense in mind, with a system of casemates and an ingenious solution for ventilation and smoke extraction after shots. The fortress was completed after 1588 by its new owner, Mikuláš Pálffy, by adding two more storey residential wings and one ground floor wing in the northwest. At the same time, the fortress became a magnificent Renaissance castle with artistically valuable furnished residential interiors.

 

Later reconstructions only increased the representativeness of the ancestral mansion. Although the castle was damaged by fire several times in the following centuries, the Pálffys, who owned it until the Second World War, repaired it each time, so that it has been preserved to this day in its historical form. Today, the building serves as a furniture museum.