Hanging with the Princes at their Castle

Or, how an old reporter keeps talking to people

Back when I was a newspaper reporter at The Virginian-Pilot, one of the better writers there said that many reporters are introverts propelled by curiosity and ambition into a job that requires talking to people all day.

Without going too much into it, I think there is some truth to that. I like talking to people, but sometimes I can be shy and have to push myself to do so. I did so last week, and was rewarded with meeting  some Bohemian princes, and an invitation to a conference at their palace on how NFTs might help restore their art.

All of which is the subject of this week’s newsletter.

It began about a month ago, when I made an expedition with my daughter EC up a steep hill to the Toy Museum, which sits in one corner of the Prague Castle. The Prague Castle is this enormous complex that overlooks the city, sort of like Buckingham Palace but even larger. The Toy Museum had all these neat toys from history in display cases, but no toys for a child to play with or touch! EC ended up crying, I bet not the first child to do so there. 

But on the way out, I noticed this small sign on the building across the street advertising the museum at Lobkowicz Palace. I went inside, and an attendant told me it was a museum that housed some of the family’s collection of art. I love that sort of thing, meaning art that is attached to some sort of history, so I made a note to come back.

A few weeks later, on a Tuesday morning, I did. There were few other visitors. I climbed to the second  floor (we would call it the third  floor), and worked my way down. There was a sequence of rooms basically following the history of the House of Lobkowicz, scions of Czech royalty, for six centuries" It started with life-sized paintings from the 1500s by Velazquez and other now famous artists, documenting the family’s prestige and power. I bet these long-dead ancestors would be shocked that the artists who painted their pictures are often more famous than the people they painted.  I stopped in front of one painting by Georges Van Der (Jorge De La Rua) Straeten, of Elizabeth of Austria, who would become queen of France by marriage in the late 16th century.

Then it went into the 17th and 18th centuries, into guns and armor and then music.

The family had developed a streak of deep appreciation of music, and had actually sponsored compositions by Beethoven, which explained how the museum had original scores from the composer. The sixth Prince Lobkowicz wrote his own compositions. 

Then into the 18th and 19th centuries, and paintings by Bruegel and Canaletto. The two works by Canaletto, the Venetian, were enormous and occupied opposing walls in one room. They documented life on the River Thames in London, including on a festival day. The sixth Prince of Lobkowicz had bought them shortly after they were painted during a sojourn to the English city around 1745. 

Much of his information came through my audio headset, that for once I actually used. In my ear, the pleasant voice of William Lobkowicz, current head of the family, told me about the art and the family’s history. Occasionally, other people would come on the headset, such as art experts and other family members. I was fascinated. 

The family, I would learn that day and in coming ones, had been some of the reigning princes of this land, including the Kingdom of Bohemia, probably second only to the emperor of Austria and before that the Holy Roman Emperor. The line stretches back to the 14th century. At one point, they had 17 castles!

Then in 1918, Austria-Hungary was on the losing side of the first World War and the allied powers broke up its empire. This included creating the new democratic country of Czechoslovakia. As I understand it, the new government abolished much of the official trappings of the nobility, and took away some, but not all, of the family’s properties. Still, the family was esteemed and prosperous, retaining ownership of their art and many of their castles, which they used. 

But then the Nazis invaded in 1939 and took everything. A bit more on that later. The family briefly got their stuff back in 1945, and then the Communists gained power in 1948 and again took everything. It was only after the so-called Velvet Revolution in 1989, led by Vaclev Havel whose name is now everywhere in this city, that the family returned to the new country that would become the Czech Republic. The family, I was told, spent a few years documenting what they had lost, and applied for the  return of their treasures . To their great surprise, most of them were.  

One nice but kind of weird aspect of the museum was the lack of guards. Security guards put me on edge, so I liked this. I could stand looking at a priceless painting, all by myself. But was this really wise? 

After about two hours, I had lunch on a balcony overlooking the city, and then stopped at the gift shop and bought my wife some ear rings and a necklace made by a local Czech glass artist. Then I noticed the stairs leading up to a different part of the palace saying “Non Fungible Castle” exhibit, free until October 15th, with a fancy logo. Soon I was in a room with soaring ceilings and windows overlooking the city, with art, some pieces with QR codes on them, and a lot of words about how the Lobkowiczs were trying to link the new sexy world of Non-fungible Tokens (NFTS), to the old world of art renovation and preservation.

I had heard a bit about NFTs, mostly the sensational stuff. Those digital cartoons, CryptoPunks, were selling for millions of dollars. The top record now for a digital NFT is $69 million. As I understand it, and this may be wrong, an NFT is a piece of digital art or image linked to a specific blockchain, the same thing used to make cryptocurrencies. The rhetoric is that these blockchains are forever and can’t be counterfeited, so people are getting in on the ground floor of this new art market. From the outside looking in, it appears to be  one big bubble, a piece of Tulipmania per the Dutch in the 1600s, but what do I know? 

I was intrigued by a few of the works on the wall. One was a digital copy of an old photo negative. It was of a painting that the Nazis had seized, and which was never recovered. The text said this negative is all that is left. Could this digital picture of it, linked to a blockchain, somehow produce value which in turn could help maintain the Lobkowicz collection?

Another exhibit had an actual painting from the 1500s. It showed a man with a hole in his chest, an actual hole, because the painting had been torn. The text told the story of people who donated to repair the painting, and received some sort of NFT in the process. That’s about all I could get straight.

As I was taking all this in, I noticed a young man striding around, talking to people. This guy looks like someone, I thought to myself. I might have called him preppie, although when I was young that was an insult. He was basically handsome with a big shock of dark hair, and a strong chin. He was wearing a white dress shirt and black jeans. He had a slight pudge around the middle. Who was he? 

Who knows?It was time for me to leave. I was almost out the doors when I looked one more time at the family portrait by the entrance. The younger man, standing with his parents and siblings, was the man I had seen upstairs! He was the young Prince Lobkowicz. (I’m not sure this title has any meaning anymore, but it’s sure fun to say.)

Are you a journalist or what, I asked myself?  Go talk to the guy. Maybe you can write something about it. I suspected, given the way he was strolling about, he had something to do with the NFT exhibit. So I walked back upstairs. What occurred then were a series of interactions, each of which required me to push myself a bit.

When I couldn't find him, I chatted with a clerk who had helped me in the gift shop downstairs. I asked for her help finding the prince. She came back shortly saying she was told he couldn’t talk then, but she gave me the number and name of his assistant. 

Oh well, I tried, I said to myself. I again left the exhibit and walked downstairs and outdoors. Then I stopped. Why don’t I simply call his assistant right now? Why wait a few hours or a few days? 

His assistant Jan answered, and when I told him I was still at the castle, he came out into the hall and we practically bumped into each other, both on our cell phones. We put our phones away. He, a nattily dressed young man in a vest if I recall, explained to me that the prince couldn’t talk right then. 

Just then, the prince himself came out into the hallway! In good reporter style, I stepped around the guy who was trying to prevent me from doing what I wanted to do, and asked the prince if he could talk. Sure, he said. So there in the hallway, we chatted about his past, his family’s history, and the NFT conference he had put together. 

He had returned to the Czech Republic when he was just four years old, from where his family lived in Boston. He had gone to high school in Prague, at an international school similar to the one my wife was teaching at. He had learned Czech. I asked him where he went to college. Harvard, he said! I had suspected as much. That gave me permission to play my Harvard card. I had done a Loeb Fellowship there in 1999-2000.

It made sense that he was behind the NFT exhibit, which concerned a subject incomprehensible to most of us. The official title was: “Nonfungible Castle: Bridging Cultural Heritage & Blockchain.” Only a young person would understand it. 

The basic idea was that the family’s collection of art was huge, and much of it was falling to pieces, in part because it  had been stored badly for 60 years. The family didn’t want to sell any of it, but even if they had, it would have been difficult because most of it had been designated as “national treasures” and they needed state permission to sell. But how to keep it up? 

If the family could create some sort of linkage between the new art world of NFTs, and the old art world of paint on canvas and rare physical objects, then the family might be able to generate another source of income for the collection’s maintenance and preservation. 

“If we can create a sense of community, we can find a new patronage model,” Lobkowicz told me. Thinking about it later, this made sense to me in that many  of the successful innovations in the digital world have a social aspect, ranging from Twitter and Facebook, to “social” investing apps like Robinhood, where participants talk stocks up and down while talking to each other. 

I asked if I could come to this big event on Saturday. Sure he said, he would put me on the list. 

So I felt proud of myself. Because I had pushed a bit, I had ended up meeting the prince and actually getting invited to his event on Saturday, which I would later learn, cost 400 Euros to the participants. It was around then that I read an article about the prince’s efforts in Bloomberg News, which I link to here because it is a model of good reporting. The writer Olga Kharif gets all the essential news in the first two paragraphs, which are also the first two sentences.

So a few days later on Saturday, armed with a press pass, I walked up the steep hill again and found myself inside the palace again, after showing proof of my vaccination. I would spend a good six hours there, listening to panelists, watching and interviewing the participants, and eating the hosts’ good lunch and break food. 

It was during the lunch break that I actually met the senior William Lobkowicz. Again, it took a little effort. He was a nice looking older man, who to me looked more American than anything else. This would make sense, given that he had spent his first three decades there.

I recognized him from his picture, and seeing that no one was talking to him, I went up and complimented him on the food. It’s not a small thing to feed a big crowd well, and the moussaka, a lentil stew and  ratatouille were all very good, as well as well as some meat-based offerings. Plus wine and beer. 

We started talking, and I think he was impressed I had actually taken the time to visit the museum a few days earlier. I told him how moved I was to hear his father briefly come on the headset, and share a story  about riding his bicycle through the halls of Roudnice Castle outside Prague, beneath the disapproving gazes of his ancestors. He would leave Prague in 1939 when the Nazis invaded, at age 10, and would live long enough to return from exile in the United States in his 60s in the1990s. 

I was about the same age as Mr. Lobkowicz Sr. He was 60, and I 62. So I remembered that no one then was predicting Communism was going to fall. How did he and others hold his family together, when it might be decades or even another century before they could return to their ancestral lands? He said that every generation of the Lobkowicz had made their own choices, and he just hoped they would make the right ones for their times. 

He was proud that his grandfather, Maximilian Lobkowicz, was a supporter of the new republic and then opposed Hitler. He and his English wife fled to England in 1939, just before the Nazis invaded. Maximilian became a leading figure in the government in exile in London. The Nazxis declared him “an enemy of the state,” and took away all his castles and art. 

As we continued to talk, Lobkowicz Sr and I moved out to the balcony overlooking the city, holding our lunch plates. I was glad we had met. 

In the afternoon, after the last speaker, I walked down the hill, boarded a tram and went home. My press pass did not include admission to the fancy gala that night at the castle. I had thought of doing what my younger self might have, which is simply show up in “creative black tie” and talk my way in. Nah, I said. You’ve had enough for today.

What I did do was rent a car for the next day, and drive out with my wife and child to Roudnice Castle, about 45 km outside Prague, the one where Wiliam Lobkowicz Sr’s father had cycled as a child under the gaze of his ancestors. What that was like is a story for another day. But at least I’m able to tell this story — and all because I made the effort to converse. 

What I’m Reading

Tara Westover is known for her excellent 2018 memoir Educated, but it turns out she does a great job as a regular journalist for The  Atlantic Magazine, writing an article about the near war going on between the red rural areas and the nearby blue cities, often in states controlled by Republicans (I’m not going to explain those terms.) I couldn’t find out when it first was published, but I read it because Atlantic Magazine released a book, The American Crisis, in the fall of 2020 with the best (in the opinion of the editors) of the magazine’s articles and essays published during the Trump years. 

Westover gets to the heart of the issue, which is that if blue cities (controlled by Democrats) keep pushing issues against the wishes of their red governors and legislatures, (controlled by Republicans), they will lose. Because legally, cities are creations of the state. She quoted local government expert and law professor Gerald Frug of Harvard, who I quote in my 2012 book, The Surprising Design of Market Economies. 

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