Nobles Dream Of Reclaiming And Restoring Family Castles -- Czech Republic Returning Ancient Properties For Families To Restore

PRAGUE, Czech Republic - Count Joseph Kinsky stands tall beside the weathered gables of his family's Georgian-style castle. Forty years under communism, including a jail term and labor in the uranium mines, did little to diminish his noble demeanor.

The castle, on the other hand, is a wreck.

Seized when Communists took control in 1948, the 27-room chateau was used for pig breeding, then left to rot.

Now it belongs again to Kinsky, who at 80 faces the enormous task of restoring it to its original splendor - but without a vast family fortune to do so.

"My relation to that castle is clearly emotional: It was my home," Kinsky said. "If anyone tells me they envy me because I am rich now, I can only say I've got things to spend money on."

Since revolutions brought down Communist governments in Eastern Europe five years ago, many nobles have sought the return of confiscated land and castles. But only the Czech Republic is handing them back.

Kinsky is one of dozens of aristocrats reclaiming the castles and palaces, factories, forests and farmlands seized by a regime that was determined to do away with the upper class.

The government is able to return vast landholdings because restitution is limited to properties confiscated after the Communist putsch in 1948 and is made only to citizens who live in the republic. The law excludes so-called traitors among the gentry - those who opted for German citizenship after the Nazis' occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

This, and the fact the nobles are not seeking political power along with their old wealth, has made restitution palatable to Czechs.

About 30 castles have been returned, and 75 applications have been denied because the former owners allegedly were Nazi collaborators. About 100 requests are pending.

Whether they fled their homeland or stayed in the country as Kinsky did, most aristocratic Czech families have lost their once-great fortunes.

The return of their estates makes them land-rich again, but many are cash-poor.

Kinsky, whose nobility dates to the 13th century, estimates it will cost $7 million to restore his castle, 75 miles east of Prague, and convert it into a family memorial, a public museum with the Kinsky art collection and heirlooms rescued from storage or other museums.

"It's a ruin. And as I have lived 40 years in socialism, I haven't got the millions. I am hoping that someone will give them to me," Kinsky said.

The Nazis were the first to confiscate the castle, in 1939, and Kinsky's family moved to Prague.

The castle was returned, then appropriated by the Communists, who allowed Kinsky's parents to live in two rooms until 1951.

Kinsky's siblings had left the country, but he and his wife remained behind to care for his aging parents.

In October 1949, Kinsky was jailed for two years as a class enemy and put to work in uranium mines, where he labored for five years. He subsequently worked in translating jobs, a lacquer factory and, finally, in a state-run insurance company until retiring in the 1970s.

When Kinsky sought the return of his family properties in 1992, his wife protested she wasn't about to wash the castle's 70 windows twice a year.

But the government hastened to give back the decrepit building, and the Kinskys moved into the former servant quarters last year.

They also have received nearly 5,000 acres of forest lands and are negotiating for the return of more than 800 acres of farmland.

Kinsky and other aristocrats seem to regard their castles in much the same way as priests do their churches: The castles preceded them by centuries and will outlive them; the nobles are not so much owners of private property as administrators of an estate that is to be passed on.

`FOR HISTORY'

In the nearby town of Castolovice, workers pound on the roof of a Renaissance castle with the same name.

Diana Sternberg Phipps, whose family bought the estate in 1694, struggles to describe why she returned to undertake its renovation.

"(It is) for my family, for history," said Phipps, a countess by birth whose family fled to the United States in 1948.

Like the Kinskys', the Sternberg castle was confiscated during the Nazi occupation. It was returned after World War II, and the family lived there before emigrating.

The castle was a museum and trade school under the Communists and, although it is in far better shape than Kinsky's, requires a tremendous amount of work.

Some Czech nobles today dismiss the label of aristocrat.

"We are no aristocrats. We are the descendants of aristocratic families," Kinsky insisted. "Titles are for snobs."

The nobles note that some people still dislike the new market economics and suspect that anyone with money must have come by it illegally.

Milan Uhde, president of the Czech Parliament, said that the government has a policy of restitution and that "the return of property to nobility should be judged in the same way as the return of property to anybody else."

Generally it is, except when Czechs feel that nobles are receiving special treatment or when they suspect a property owner of having been a Nazi collaborator.