Baroque Orangery of Manětín Château (zámecká oranžérie)

A former commandery of the Order of St John recorded in 1187, Manětín Château has belonged to the Lažanský family since 1622. After the fire of 1712 it was rebuilt in the Baroque style on the initiative of Marie Gabriela Lažanská, and the garden was reworked in the same spirit. The orangery belongs to this campaign. The château's own page reports a first indirect mention in 1711: when Václav Josef Lažanský sold the estate to his wife Marie Gabriela, née Černín, he reserved the use of the citrus trees grown in containers, which suggests a shelter for wintering them without proving that it was the present building. The page on the garden gives 1734, with a qualification.

In the nineteenth century the interior paintings were whitewashed so that the plants would receive more light; in the early twentieth century the building served mainly farm purposes and two small growing houses were attached to it. After 1948 the state stopped running the greenhouses and orangeries of historic gardens: the Manětín orangery passed into private hands and decayed until, for a time, only its outer walls remained. The château administration recovered it in 1997. An archaeological survey in spring 2019 identified several phases of use. The restoration, carried out from March 2019 to August 2020 by the National Heritage Institute (NPÚ), aimed at a state close to the Baroque period; it cost the Institute about 9.8 million crowns, most of the money coming from the Ministry of Culture. The project was designed by the architect Tomáš Šantavý and the work was done by the firm Stavoservis Vratislav Kypta. The orangery reopened to visitors in August 2020.

The building stands free, on a rectangular plan running east to west, in plastered mixed masonry with unadorned façades. On the south side the inclined front rests on a stone plinth and carries a glazed wall in a timber frame, the original frame of which survives. The château describes a lean-to roof ending in a rounded projection called a swan neck, the commonest form in the Baroque period; the heritage catalogue instead describes a gabled slate roof, with a lower eastern part whose glazed slope is also in timber frames. The entrance, a double door in a stone surround, opens in the axis of the west gable; the interior is a single space, and the north wall, of which painted fragments remain, is divided by semicircular niches, some reopened after being walled up.

The 2019 excavations uncovered beneath the floor heating channels of several generations, a Baroque floor level of slate slabs and several furnaces, among them a large external furnace behind the north wall. A masonry aviary for turtle doves and other ornamental birds has survived. A 2021 report by the Faculty of Horticulture of Mendel University notes that the orangery forms the counterpart of a coach house of the same dimensions, with no service corridor on the north side, and that the remains of Baroque frescoes in its interior are the first documented example of their kind in the Czech Republic.

From the 1711 deed onward there is mention of citrus trees grown in containers and brought indoors for the winter; the place also served as a winter garden and as a room for the château's social life. The interior walls, painted in the eighteenth century, were whitewashed in the following century to give the plants as much light as possible; they reappeared beneath the plaster during the restoration.

For its return to service, the plants were supplied by a vocational secondary school in Prague, according to the château's page. Since the reopening the building has also served as a setting for concerts, exhibitions, receptions and weddings; an evening of Christmas carols is announced there for 12 December 2026, by reservation. The masonry aviary, designed for turtle doves and other ornamental birds, is among the original elements preserved around the hall.

The orangery lies in the eastern part of the garden, in line with the coach house. According to the Weekend of Open Gardens listing, it can be seen on a guided tour of the garden, the park and the orangery, in season only; the château also opens it for occasional events. The Baroque garden, documented as early as 1604, is organised around a central axis running from the entrance arch to the former brewery; south of the Manětínský potok stream, a landscape park from the early nineteenth century keeps a pond, a hermitage and a pavilion on an artificial mound. The basic château tour lasts 45 minutes; according to Wikipedia it shows a hall with a fresco of 1730 and a library of more than five thousand volumes.