Konopiste

*Disclaimer: the image below is NOT mine, I found this on a Google image search*

 

Konopiste was the home of Franz Ferdinand along with his wife and children. Franz Ferdinand took over this castle when he was only 18 after the death of Franz Joseph in 1916. The Gothic character of this castle is not very obvious, it is kind of hidden. First, the castle sits on top of a large hill in the woods and it is secluded from all of civilization. When you look around on the inside, the ceilings in the rooms go into the gothic point. Then all of the dead animals on the walls that Ferdinand killed is another Gothic characteristic because it is very creepy, odd, and not normal. Along with that, one would feel like they were always surrounded by death which might make one become very depressed. One might argue that Franz was insane because he killed over 300,000 different kinds of animals and then proceeded to hang them on the walls as a trophy with the date and place of the animal that he killed. I saw a painting of a donkey on the wall in one of the rooms and personally, I think that he was just an a**.  The rooms on the inside were not connected with a hallway (minus the main hallway in the front) and therefore, privacy was not something they were given much of. Which again could lead to an imprisonment/ caged feeling, a sense of loneliness. Something else you could consider being Gothic was the way Franz died, he was killed as if he was the animal and someone was hunting him.