Manský dvůr

A homestead with a rich past

The first mention of Manský dvůr dates back to 1242. The site of the farmstead was originally a guard post, later changed to a fief. This is where the former German name Lehnhof comes from. Before the First World War, the estate belonged to the Kynžvartsky estate. As part of the land reform of 1919, the estate became a so-called residual estate.

Manský dvůr

In the early 1930s, the family of Prague architect Milan Babuška bought the devastated farm and the overgrown land and purchased additional land. They improved it until World War II. Next to the farm, the architect designed and, as an investor, built a family villa in the modernist style. At the same time, he had a system of water reservoirs built in the valley below the farm according to the design of the prominent Czechoslovak ichthyologist Schaferna.The period of restoration of Manský dvůr ended in 1938 with the occupation of the border region. Babuška's family had to leave the farm. At that time, the farm was so attractive that the leader of the Sudeten German party and war criminal Konrad Henlein took it as his summer residence. Legend has it that he wanted to rebuild the farm in the shape of a swastika. Henlein himself never managed the farm; during World War II, his wife and three sons lived there. The farm was looked after by a group of French prisoners of war.After 1945, the estate returned to the Babušek family for a short time, but in 1948 it was nationalized. The previously prosperous estate began to fall into disrepair and changed owners during reorganizations, most recently Agrostatek Žandov. After 1989, the estate was acquired again by the Babušek family and gradually reconstructed it to its original form. A guesthouse and pub were built in one of the buildings.Since 2003, the reconstructed building has housed a small museum with hundreds of exhibits, mainly related to the history of the Mariánské Lázně region. The exhibits of historical objects and curiosities in the freely accessible regional museum come from the private collections of the Mariánské Lázně historian and regional publicist Zdeněk Buchtele.