A Fortress Built by MoneyPevnosť, ktorú postavili peniaze
There was a castle here in the Middle Ages — one of the chain of strongholds recorded in the thirteenth century along the Little Carpathian passes, watching the road that ran up from the Danube toward Moravia. Its name, Red Stone, is old and nobody can explain it with certainty. That medieval castle matters mainly because of what was built on top of it.Hrad tu stál už v stredoveku — jeden z reťaze pevností doložených v trinástom storočí pri malokarpatských priesmykoch, ktorá strážila cestu vedúcu od Dunaja k Morave. Jeho meno, Červený Kameň, je staré a nikto ho nevie s istotou vysvetliť. Ten stredoveký hrad je dôležitý najmä pre to, čo naň postavili neskôr.
In the 1530s the estate came to the Fuggers of Augsburg, the banking house that financed emperors and controlled a large share of Europe’s copper trade. They did not want a castle; they wanted a fireproof, bombproof warehouse with guns on it. What they built was a low, thick-walled quadrangle with four enormous corner bastions, laid out to the new Italian principles of artillery defence that were then spreading north across the continent — and beneath it, cellars on a scale nobody in the region had seen. The Ottomans were pushing into Hungary in exactly these decades; the Fuggers were protecting stock, not pride.V tridsiatych rokoch šestnásteho storočia pripadlo panstvo Fuggerovcom z Augsburgu, bankovému domu, ktorý financoval cisárov a ovládal veľkú časť európskeho obchodu s meďou. Nechceli hrad; chceli ohňovzdorný a delám odolný sklad s delami na streche. Postavili nízky štvorcový objekt s hrubými múrmi a štyrmi obrovskými nárožnými baštami, riešený podľa nových talianskych zásad delostreleckej obrany, ktoré sa vtedy šírili na sever kontinentom — a pod ním pivnice v rozmeroch, aké v kraji nikto nevidel. Práve v týchto desaťročiach tlačili Osmani do Uhorska; Fuggerovci chránili tovar, nie prestíž.
In 1583 the Fuggers sold up, and Červený Kameň passed to the Pálffy family, who kept it until the Second World War. Over those centuries the warehouse became a home: Renaissance and then Baroque rooms were fitted inside the fortress shell, a chapel was decorated, a garden hall was built, and the guns became ornaments. The building never lost its blunt military outline — which is precisely why the elegance inside comes as such a surprise.V roku 1583 Fuggerovci predali a Červený Kameň prešiel na rod Pálfiovcov, ktorí ho držali až do druhej svetovej vojny. Za tie storočia sa zo skladu stal domov: do pevnostného obalu vstavali renesančné a neskôr barokové sály, vyzdobili kaplnku, postavili záhradnú sálu a z diel sa stali ozdoby. Stavba nikdy nestratila svoju strohú vojenskú siluetu — a práve preto vás elegancia vnútri zaskočí.
