The village of Lány, twenty miles from Prague, stands in a region of fields and forests used for hunting since at least the tenth century. But it was in 1587 that Emperor Rudolf II forged a powerful link between Prague Castle and Lány, when he had a hunting lodge built here and incorporated the land into the royal estates During the seventeenth century, Rudolf’s comparatively small building was used to form the basis of a larger renaissance-style chateau. The Earls of Wallenstein purchased the property in 1685, and under their stewardship the chateau gained an extra storey and a separate chapel, before passing by marriage into the hands of the Fürstenberg family. In 1921, three years after the foundation of