COLUMN ONE : Noble Try to Reclaim Heritage : The Czech Republic is reviving aristocrats’ old dreams by returning castles, land seized by the Communists. Fortunes and titles have faded, but the chance to restore family honor still shines.

Count Joseph Kinsky stands tall beside the weathered gables of his family’s Georgian-style castle. Forty years under communism, including a jail term and labor in the uranium mines, did little to diminish his noble demeanor.

The castle, on the other hand, is a wreck.

Seized by the government when Communists took control in 1948, the 27-room chateau was used for pig breeding, then left to rot.

Now it belongs again to Kinsky, who at 80 faces the enormous task of restoring it to its original splendor--but without a vast family fortune to do so.

“My relation to that castle is clearly emotional--it was my home,” Kinsky said. “If anyone tells me they envy me because I am rich now, I can only say I’ve got things to spend money on.”

Since revolutions brought down Communist governments in Eastern Europe five years ago, many nobles have sought the return of confiscated land and castles. But only the Czech Republic is readily handing them back.

Kinsky is one of dozens of aristocrats reclaiming the castles and palaces, factories, forests and farmlands seized by a regime that was determined to do away with the upper class.

The current government is able to return vast landholdings with little protest from a public raised on socialism because restitution is limited to properties confiscated after the Communist putsch in 1948 and is made only to citizens who live in the republic. The law excludes so-called traitors among the gentry--those who opted for German citizenship after Hitler’s occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938--while recognizing those seen as patriots for retaining their Czech nationality.

This, and the fact that the nobles are not seeking political power along with their old wealth, has made restitution palatable to Czechs, not all of whom have profited from the country’s return to capitalism.

Property claims have met varied fates elsewhere.

Hungary is offering compensation coupons to former property owners, including nobles, that can be used to buy back businesses, land or even castles at favorable prices.

Poland allows former owners to sue in court if they believe that the confiscations were illegal.

The German government is bound by its unification treaty not to return property confiscated during the postwar land reform in East Germany. A law that would allow former owners to buy back part of those properties at subsidized prices is under discussion.

Romania has yet to decide how it will resolve the land issue, and in Russia, some nobility have hinted they might like their estates back.

The Czech Republic passed its reclamation laws in 1990 and 1991--when it was still Czechoslovakia. In what is now Slovakia, as in the Baltic states, most of the nobility was foreign and therefore ineligible for restitution or compensation.

Those who seek restitution must present proof of prior ownership to the government agency that owns the property--usually the municipality, in the case of castles--and a denial may be appealed in court.

About 30 castles have been returned and 75 applications have been denied because the former owners allegedly were Nazi collaborators, according to the Czech Press Agency. About 100 requests are pending.

Whether they fled their homeland or stayed in the country as Kinsky did, most aristocratic Czech families have lost their once-great fortunes.

The return of their estates makes them land-rich again, but many remain cash-poor.

In addition to the castles being dilapidated, the thousands of acres being returned are in need of reforesting or farming investment.

Kinsky, whose nobility dates to the 13th Century, estimates that it will cost about $7 million to restore his Kostelec nad Orlici castle, about 75 miles east of Prague, and convert it into a family memorial, a public museum with the Kinsky art collection and heirlooms rescued from storage or other museums.

“It’s a ruin. And as I have lived 40 years in socialism, I haven’t got the millions. I am hoping that someone will give them to me,” Kinsky said with a genteel smile.

The Nazis had been the first to confiscate the castle, in 1939, and Kinsky’s family moved then to Prague, where his Viennese mother took Czech citizenship in solidarity with his father.

The castle was returned, then appropriated by the Communists, who allowed Kinsky’s parents to live in two rooms until 1951.

Kinsky’s siblings had left the country, but he and his wife remained behind to care for his aging parents.

In October, 1949, Kinsky was jailed for two years as a class enemy and put to work in uranium mines, where he labored for five years. He subsequently worked in translating jobs, a lacquer factory and, finally, in a state-run insurance company until retiring in the 1970s.

When Kinsky sought the return of his family properties in 1992, his wife protested that she wasn’t about to wash the castle’s 70 windows twice a year.

But the government hastened to give back the decrepit building, and the Kinskys moved into the former servant quarters last year.

They also have received nearly 5,000 acres of forest lands and are negotiating with the government for the return of more than 800 acres of farmland.

Kinsky and other aristocrats seem to regard their castles in much the same way as priests do their churches: The castles preceded them by centuries and will outlive them; the nobles are not so much owners of private property as administrators of an estate that is to be passed on to subsequent generations.

In the nearby town of Castolovice, workers pound on the roof of a Renaissance castle with the same name.

Diana Sternberg Phipps, whose family bought the estate in 1694, struggles for words to describe why she returned to the Czech Republic to undertake its renovation.

“(It is) for my family, for history,” said Phipps, a countess by birth whose family fled to the United States in 1948. “There is something to the fact that the family has been here since 1200, in this house since the 1600s.”

In fact, records of the family’s eight-pointed star crest have been traced back as far as 1130.

Castolovice was built a couple of centuries later and eventually bought by the Counts Sternberg to be the seat of the head of the family.

Like the Kinsky’s, the Sternberg castle was confiscated during the Nazi occupation. It was returned after World War II, and the family lived there before emigrating.

The castle was a museum and trade school under the Communists and, although it is in far better shape than Kinsky’s, requires a tremendous amount of work.

Phipps, a decorator during her years in the United States and England and author of the book “Affordable Splendor,” is paying for the renovation herself but throws up her hands when asked the cost.

She is improving the museum, installing two restaurants and converting 15 bedrooms and baths into a guest house to be rented out to conference groups and hunting parties to pay for the castle’s maintenance. Some rooms will be renovated as family quarters.

Castolovice’s paintings depict the bygone aristocracy’s shooting parties, at which hundreds of fowl, deer and wild boar were brought in.

At nearby Doudleby nad Orlici, also recently returned to its owner, a hallway is filled with antler trophies bearing the dates and names of the noble shooters.

Some Czech nobles today dismiss the label of aristocrat, noting that royal courts were abolished by the government of the first Czech Republic after World War I, and princes and counts became simply “misters.”

“We are no aristocrats. We are the descendants of aristocratic families,” Kinsky insisted. “Titles are for snobs.”

Phipps notes that she lost her title by marrying a commoner.

“I was never impressed with titles,” said 97-year-old Jindrich Kolowrat, a count by birth. “A lot of aristocrats resent that titles were abolished, like somebody stole something from them. But the aristocracy made a lot of historic blunders. Only a few families really were always faithful. Even we were not always. Some (Kolowrats) allied with the Germans of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.”

Kolowrat sits in a winged-back armchair in the living room of the home he built long ago on a hill overlooking Prague. The house was taken by an SS officer during the Nazi occupation and by the Interior Ministry during Communist times as a hotel for spies who came in from Czech embassies around the world.

The count lived out the Communist years in the United States as a successful businessman, first with a dairy farm and, later, fitness centers.

He returned to the Czech Republic in his 90s because, he said, “we’ve been here for 800 years. I had no historical connection to America.”

Besides his house, his family has retrieved forest land, commercial property and two castles, one in downtown Prague that is rented to the National Theater for the next 20 years--for one Czech crown (about 4 cents) per year.

The Kolowrats have a noble name and more money than most Czechs. They are aristocratically vague about how much land they have reclaimed; one does not discuss money in polite society. But also they are careful not to stir what they believe are undercurrents of resentment among Czechs who have not fared so well under capitalism.

The nobles note that some people still dislike the new market economics and suspect that anyone with money must have come by it illegally.

Milan Uhde, president of the Czech Parliament, said that the government has a policy of restitution and that “the return of property to nobility should be judged in the same way as the return of property to anybody else.”

Generally it is, except when Czechs feel that nobles are receiving special treatment--such as a wink on the residency requirement--or when they suspect a property owner of having been a Nazi collaborator.

The former Communist Party newspaper Rude Pravo charged recently that about 200 people had relied on “influential members of government” to get back their Czech citizenship so that they could seek the return of their properties.

The paper alleged that some of those were “gray cases,” former Nazi collaborators who should not be accepted back.

Otherwise, say Czechs such as 68-year-old economist Miroslav Kuhn, “noblemen are people too.”

“I believe all that was stolen should be returned,” said 62-year-old Anezka Smutna, a retiree.

Although the aristocrats do not possess the official titles or riches of their ancestors, most Czechs know who the nobles are and frequently address them as count or countess.

Many also expect nobility to act like nobility--a surprise to the generation that left very young and returned after decades abroad.

“They see me walking through our buildings with a light bulb or screwdriver and say, ‘Count, you’re not supposed to be doing that,’ ” said Kolowrat’s 51-year-old son, Tomas. “They have no idea what it meant for my father to start over in America. Everyone has expectations of how a count should behave. But we are American. You are what you make of yourself, not what you inherit.”

With the titles also comes pressure to live up to the past.

Tomas Kolowrat points to 18th-Century family portraits hanging over Interior Ministry furniture.

“Look at them,” he said. “Look at the people and what they achieved. They are historical characters.”

Adam Bubna-Litic, also born a count, was broke and anonymous when he emigrated to Australia in the early 1950s. After a childhood in the Doudleby castle amid Renaissance graffito designs and Baroque stone muses, Bubna worked in a factory and drove a bus before becoming a teacher and, eventually, a principal.

He got Doudleby back a year ago and is working on several projects that he hopes will make the Doudleby self-supporting.

He says an aristocrat’s life is under constant scrutiny.

“There is a certain obligation,” Bubna said. “I must always appear as an honest, straight citizen helpful to others. The problem is, at the moment I have to help myself. Already there have been certain requests that are quite unrealistic. They think because I have a title I am made of money.”

The nobles say they are not only too poor but also too busy to re-create the aristocratic society and lifestyle of their forebears. They are looking forward rather than back, looking to the future of their lands and castles and family memorials.

“I took the castle and all the work on my shoulders,” Kinsky said. “I’m 80 and have not many years in prospect. But I want to keep on that cultural object that was built up by my family.”