The setting sun painted everything gold. This was the hour when travel becomes pilgrimage, when tourism transcends itself. The stones remembered their builders. The river remembered all the faces that had gazed into its waters. The castle remembered its purpose—not just defense or display, but the human impulse to create something beautiful and lasting.
I thought of Perchta of Rosenberg, the White Lady whose ghost supposedly walks these corridors still. Born around 1429, daughter of Oldřich II of Rosenberg, she had a happy childhood in these walls before being married off at twenty against her will to Jan of Liechtenstein. Her letters from that hellish marriage survived—ninety-two remarkable documents, some in her own hand, describing years of abuse and pleading with her family for rescue that never came. When her dying husband finally asked forgiveness, she refused. His curse, according to legend, trapped her spirit here. Local residents still report seeing her—a woman in white with keys at her waist, appearing before births and deaths, caring for children when nurses fall asleep. Even the Nazis, according to one story, couldn't unfurl their banners from the tower—Perchta's ghost pointed an accusing finger until the young women dropped the swastikas in fear.
I left understanding something I hadn't expected about power and its aftermath. The Rosenbergs ruled for three centuries until debt—debt!—forced the last lord, Peter Vok, to sell everything to Emperor Rudolf II in 1602. The Eggenbergs followed, then the Schwarzenbergs, until the Communists seized it all in 1947. Each dynasty believed they were building for eternity. Each was undone by the same forces that built them: ambition, money, politics.
The real revelation wasn't about preservation or authenticity. It was about the stubborn persistence of ordinary life beneath the grand narratives. While lords schemed and empires rose and fell, someone had to sweep the courtyards, tend the bears, light the theater candles, serve the goulash. Today's sixty -year-old waitress speaking four languages, yesterday's scullery maid speaking only one—separated by centuries, united by the simple fact of getting on with it while history happened around them.
The last tour group gathered around their plastic sunflower. Forty-three strangers who would remember this place differently, each taking away their own version of what they'd seen. The guide counted heads, checked watches, pointed toward the bus. Tomorrow there would be another group, another day, another performance. But tonight, the castle belonged to itself again.