The story
Brutal Assault in Jaroměř/Josefov
Brutal Assault, running since 1996 and originally focused on grindcore, has staged its extreme metal festival inside the eighteenth-century Josefov fortress near Jaromer since 2008. Stages sit among the fortress's star-shaped bastions and brick ramparts, while its underground catacombs host horror-film screenings and dark-art exhibitions, drawing over ten thousand attendees in its first year at the site and growing since.
Brutal Assault started in 1996 as a grindcore-focused gathering, more than a decade before it found the venue now central to its identity: the eighteenth-century Josefov fortress outside Jaromer, an army stronghold built between 1780 and 1787 under Emperor Joseph the Second as a defensive bulwark against Prussian expansion that, in the end, never saw major combat.