Žehušice

Žehušice is a small town in the Kutná Hora district of Bohemia, tucked north of Čáslav in a quiet, rural corner of the Czech countryside. Only a few hundred to under a thousand people live here, yet the place holds something most towns twice its size can't claim: a Baroque-era château wrapped in an English landscape park, next to a reserve that has bred white deer for nearly two hundred years.

What can visitors see in Žehušice?

The château

The early Baroque château was raised by the Thun family between 1661 and 1679. A 19th-century remodel gave the building its current Empire-style restraint - clean lines, classical detailing, and a symmetry that feels understated rather than showy compared with grander Bohemian palaces.

The château park

The grounds originally held a formal French garden, all straight lines and geometry. Under Josef Osvald of Thun-Hohenstein, that garden was reshaped into a sprawling 25-hectare English park, laid out for wandering rather than admiring from a fixed viewpoint. Dendrologists single it out for species rarely found together in a Czech park: catalpa, the handkerchief tree (Davidia), assorted maple varieties, plane trees, tulip trees, copper beech, and ash trees with golden or silvery bark.

The white deer reserve

Next to the park sits a much larger enclosure - roughly ten times the park's size - built for a single purpose: keeping white deer alive and breeding. The animals arrived in Bohemia around 1780, and almost everywhere they were introduced, local conditions proved too harsh for them to last. Žehušice turned out to be the exception. Around 1830, Josef Matyáš Thun received a group of the animals from Josef Leopold Kinský, and the herd has held on ever since. Today roughly 130 white deer live in the reserve, sharing the grounds with a black-coated variant of fallow deer. Worth knowing before planning a trip: the reserve is currently closed to the public, and the nature trail that once ran along its edge has been discontinued, so the deer are best appreciated through photographs and local accounts rather than a close-up visit.

Where is Žehušice, and how do you get there?

The town sits in the Central Bohemian countryside, a short distance north of Čáslav, in an area that sees relatively little tourist traffic. For travelers, that's part of the appeal - there's room to look around without competing with crowds.

Frequently asked questions

Can you actually see the white deer in Žehušice? Not at the moment. The reserve is closed to the public and its old educational trail no longer operates, so the herd lives largely undisturbed by visitors.

Is the château open for tours? The château remains privately held, and access arrangements change from time to time. It's worth checking current conditions with the estate or a local tourist information point before making a trip specifically for that reason.

How many people live in Žehušice? It's a small town - population figures put it somewhere between several hundred and around nine hundred residents depending on the source and year, consistent with its character as a modest rural community rather than a tourist hub.

Where did the white deer come from? White deer were brought into Bohemia near the end of the 18th century but failed to thrive in most places they were introduced. Žehušice became an exception after Josef Matyáš Thun acquired a herd from the Kinský family around 1830, and the population has persisted here ever since - unlike at other estates where similar attempts didn't take.

What else is nearby worth combining with a visit? Kutná Hora, with its famous ossuary and the Cathedral of St. Barbara, and the town of Čáslav are both close enough to pair with Žehušice for a quieter, off-the-beaten-path stop in Central Bohemia.