A Moat with Bears

This guide to the Moat with Bears at Český Krumlov Castle traces the story back to 1556, when Wilhelm von Rosenberg reworked his family's coat of arms to claim descent from Rome's Orsini family, a claim resting mostly on a pun between orsa and Orsini. It follows how that invented pedigree turned into a menagerie, with bears first recorded in the moat in 1707 and the population emptying and refilling across the centuries, including a mysterious twenty-year gap nobody ever explained. Along the way you'll meet Ruschi and Ajax, two females who lived here in the early twentieth century.