DREAM of a castle a proper Renaissance one, set in rolling wooded countryside near Prague. With a large arcaded courtyard, plenty of impressive reception rooms, probably a ghost or two, oodles of old family portraits, a Velasquez among them.
Dozens of other magnificent paintings form a mouth watering, catalogue of European art a large Canaletto of a Thames scene bought by an 18th century Lubkowicz in a fit of absence of mind, works by Lucas Cranach, Breughel, Rubens...
Nelahozeves is a place for superlatives. The third largest collection of Spanish portraits in the world, furniture, glass, ceramics, steadily amassed over the centuries, a glimpse into a vanished world of central European power politics stretching back for 500 years. And perhaps most striking of all, the Roudnice Lubkowicz family who own it and a lot more have managed to hold on to it in spite of wars and revolutions, coups d-etat and 40 years of communism.
Ivor McElveen, late of the Industrial Development Authority and now chairman of L.E. Holdings which manages the Lubkowicz family fortune, sums it all up in a few words. "Apart from the fabulous art collection there are some five or six castles depending on whether you count Roudnice or not the old family home, currently the Czech army music school, a winery, a brewery, a mineral water company, about 10,000 hectares of forestry. And houses, properties and real estate. But there are landlord and tenant acts, so it is not all as lucrative as it might seem."
Quite enough to be going on with, however. At present the managing company is putting a little order on the vast holdings returned to William Lubkowicz under the Czech restitution law in 1990. Thousands of hectares of pine forest in northern Bohemia have gone up for sale, also a spa hotel near another family castle at Balina. Eventually only strategic sites will be held on to all the rest will be sold, apart from the castles which are a drug on the property market and will be developed for tourism.
William Lubkowicz, Harvard educated, worked n real estate in the United States, and has adopted a no nonsense approach to his heritage, according to McElveen, a stance dictated as much by the ramshackle nature of much of the empire after decades of state ownership as his feeling that family grandeur is a bit out of place in the modern Czech Republic.
Princes of the Holy Roman Empire, high chancellors of Bohemia, dukes of Roudnice and Sagan, princes of High Chlumec, the Lubkowiczes steered a careful course over the centuries.
The real consolidator of the family fortune was a woman, Polyxena of Lubkowicz, who acquired Nelahozeves from the heirs of Florian Griespek of Griespach, a high flier in the Czech nobility who started building in the 1540s. She figures in the portrait gallery, not far from Velasquez's touching portrait of the innocent young Infanta Margaret, aged six, who died before she was 21, having produced seven children.
Apart from their political intrigues in the Bohemian kingdom and later under the Austro Hungarian Empire, the family was a major patron of the arts Dvorak was born in the village, the son of the local butcher, Gluck played in their orchestra, Wagner had the Lubkowicz castle at Strekov in mind when he created Tannhausey, Beethoven dedicated the Eroica symphony to a family member after angrily rejecting Napoleon, his initial choice, for making himself emperor. History seeps out of the stones.
McElveen, the administrator, is not the only link with Ireland. William Lubkowicz's grandmother was a Somerville from Cork. She was a divorcee and a Protestant, and did not go down well with her straitlaced Catholic in laws at the turn of the century.
"Sometimes I jokingly claim that this part of the world is the cradle of the Celts, and I came here to get restitution of our property," says McElveen. His arrival in Czechoslovakia in September 1991 had more modest objectives. Originally intending to stay for only three weeks, he spent four years under the EU Phare programme as an adviser to Vladimir Dlouhy, a bright young ex- communist minister in the first free Czechoslovak government. He stayed on in Dlouhy's cabinet after the federation broke up.
"When I arrived first, no one took parliamentary questions, it was a cheek that anyone should actually query a minister. They were used to a hierarchy, and they'd say how should we answer? And so we set up a democratic system for access to information, freedom, the right of choice. We saw that developing in practice. It was quite fascinating.
Dlouhy, he says, was a very clever lad who managed to jump horses without a foot touching the ground". He was a member of the Prognosis Institute set up some years before the collapse of communism when some of the intellectuals in the party realised that a change of system was inevitable.
Many of the leading members of the current government were from this stable Vaclav Klaus, the Prime Minister, Ivan Kocarnik, the Minister of Finance, Dlouhy, currently the Minister of Industry and Trade, and Karel Dyba, the Minister of the Economy.
"When the moment came, Havel more or less rang them up and told them to come on over. So they came over with the blueprint, and said this was what they were going to do. There was no need to discuss ideology, they had the strategy and tactics. As Dlouhy said to me, We had the plans, we just didn't have the date on them. They got straight out of the trap running."
That was how the Czech economic miracle started, and how the Lubkowiczes came back into their own.