The Story of Prague (1920)/Chapter 5

by František Lützow

CHAPTER V

Churches and Monasteries

THE churches of Prague are, and always have been, very numerous. We read that at the funeral of King Ottokar, in 1278, the bells of nearly a hundred churches pealed. The oldest ecclesiastical buildings in Prague were small round chapels of a Romanesque character, three of which are still in existence, though they were formerly far more numerous. Many churches were destroyed during the Hussite Wars, and many were restored, in deplorably bad taste, during the Catholic re-action that followed the Battle of the White Mountain. I shall in this chapter refer only to the most important churches and monasteries, though I may allude to a few others when writing of walks in and near Prague.

The Cathedral Church of St. Vitus, near the Royal castle of the Hradcany, deserves first mention. It has already been noted that the gift of a relic of St. Vitus induced Prince Wenceslas| to erect a church in honour of that saint. This small church, built in the Romanesque style,^[1] was not finished when Wenceslas was cruelly murdered by his treacherous younger brother Boleslav. When Wenceslas’s body was transported here the church became known as the Church of St. Vitus and St. Wenceslas, and after the second Bishop of Prague, the martyred Adalbert, had been also buried here, it was for a time known as ‘the Church of St. Vitus, St. Wenceslas and St. Adalbert.’^[2]

This first church, which was probably of very modest dimensions, soon became too small for the pious visitors who wished to venerate there the relics
VIEW OF STRAHOV of Wenceslas and the martyred Bishop of Prague. The church which, to use the words of Monsignore Lehner, had become ‘the metropolitan church of the whole Bohemian empire’ —then extending further than at almost any other period—remained insufficient even when a smaller church or chapel adjoining it had been erected. Prince Spytihnev II., therefore, resolved to build a larger church on the Hradcany Hill, and, space being very restricted, he demolished the old building of Wenceslas to make room for the new church, which, like the previous one, was in the Romanesque style. The new church was destroyed during the frequent civic tumults of Prague. Shortly after the foundation of the Archbishopric of Prague and during the reign of King John, it was decided to build a new cathedral on the Hradcany Hill. Charles, through whose influence the impecunious King John had given his consent to the building, took the greatest interest in it, both during the lifetime of his father and after he had succeeded him as King. As architect he chose Matthew of Arras, whom he had met during one of his visits to Avignon. After some years, the building was continued by Peter Parler and his son John. The records of the cathedral tell us that in 1418 Master Peter, generally known as Petrlik, was architect. The great buildings erected in the Gothic style, which by this time was generally adopted in Bohemia, progressed very slowly. The Hussite troubles caused a complete interruption of the work. During the reign of Vladislav II. attempts were made to continue the building, and it is probably rightly conjectured that the King entrusted this task also to his favourite architect, Benes of Loun. The Thirty Years’ War again stopped all endeavours to finish the building of the cathedral, and in the following century the bombardment by Frederick the Great greatly damaged the cathedral.

Within recent years patriotic efforts have been made to finish at last this building, of which every Bohemian, independently of his religious views and his political opinions, is necessarily proud. A society was formed for this purpose in 1859, and the restoration and rebuilding has, it must be admitted, very slowly proceeded ever since that date. The work was at first entrusted to the architect, Joseph Mocker, who had very successfully restored the bridge towers and the powder-tower at Prague. Since his death (in 1899) the work has been entrusted to Mr. Charles Hilbert. I shall now briefly refer to the cathedral as it now is, and I may mention, as it is impossible to give here a full account of the treasures which it contains, that an excellent guide book, published in German as well as in the language of the country, can be obtained in the church.

Entering the church, we first see at our left the famous Wenceslas chapel, the most magnificent of all. We enter it through bronze gates, on which is a brass ring, to which the saint is said to have clung when murderously attacked by his brother. The walls of the chapel are inlaid with Bohemian precious stones; above are curious frescoes of the time of Charles IV. The chapel also contains a candelabrum with a statue of the saint, said to be the work of Peter Fischer; a painting of the school of Lucas Cranach, representing the murder of Wenceslas; and the armour and helmet of the saint. From this chapel a secret passage leads to the room where the Bohemian crown jewels are preserved. We next come to the Martinic chapel, that of St. Simon and Juda, and then that of the Waldstein family; opposite the last-named chapel is a wood-carving representing the devastation of the church by Frederick of the Palatinate, which has already been mentioned in these pages.

Between the Waldstein and the Vlasim chapels is the Royal oratory or pew, which is connected by a covered passage with the Hradcany Castle. The oratory was built during the reign of Vladislav II. by Benes of Loun.

Opposite the Vlasim chapel—built by Ocko of Vlasim, Archbishop of Prague, who died in 1380—is the shrine of St. John Nepomuk, which greatly attracts the attention of the visitors to the cathedral, though it has more barbaric splendour than artistic value. In
ST. VITUS FROM THE ‘STAG’S DITCH’ the nave of the church is the monument to the Bohemian kings, erected under Rudolph’s reign by Colin of Malines.

Charles IV. and his four wives, Ladislas, Posthumus, George of Podebrad, Ferdinand I., Maximilian, as well as Rudolph himself, are buried here.

Next to St. Vitus in importance is the Tyn Church in the market-place of the old town. It has great historical interest as having been the stronghold of the Hussite movement during its whole duration, as has been already mentioned. Waldhauser and Milic, the precursors of Hus, preached here, and here, also, Archbishop Rokycan delivered his fiery sermons.

Of the many later preachers at this church, Gallus Cahera deserves notice. A personal friend of Luther, he strove to transform the ancient Utraquism of Bohemia into the Lutheranism that was then just beginning to dawn on the world.

George of Podebrad proceeded to this church with the Bohemian nobles immediately after they had elected him as their King, and was joyfully received by Rokycan and the Utraquist clergy.

The Tyn Church was of very modest origin. It was orginally a chapel attached to the building known as the ‘Tyn,’ which German merchants who traded with Bohemia erected to exhibit their wares.

The present building, begun in the fourteenth century, was finished in the fifteenth, during the reign of King George. It has suffered less from barbarous ‘restorers’ than most of the Prague churches. The fine façade built by Podebrad remains, but the statue of that King, which represented him as pointing upward with his sword to a chalice, of which he was so valiant a defender, was removed by the Jesuits in 1623 as being—an ‘Utraquist emblem.’ They, at the same time, caused the two great bells of the Tyn Church that had been known as ‘Hus’ and ‘Hieronymus’ to be removed and recast; but when they had been refounded and the Jesuits had again placed them in their former position, it was found, to the great delight of those who still secretly sympathised with the ancient faith, that the sound was unaltered.^[3]

The interior of the church contains some paintings by Skreta, a handsome—though renovated—pulpit from which Rokycan is said to have preached, and the tomb of Tycho Brahe. One of the finest churches in Prague is that of St. Nicholas, on the Malostranské Námesti, built in the seventeenth century in the style of the Italian Renaissance.

Of the many monasteries of Prague, I shall first mention the premonstratension Monastery of Mount Sion or Strahov. It is situated at the extremity of the Malá Strana, and the name of Strahov is derived from the Bohemian word ‘straz,’ guard, as a guard was formerly established here to secure the safety of travellers arriving at Prague by the Strahov gate.

The monastery was founded in 1142 by Bishop Zdik of Olmütz, during the reign of King Vladislav I. The first building was of very modest dimensions, and both the monastery and the church that belongs to it were rebuilt several times before the present structure was erected by Italian architects at the end of the seventeeth century. Considerable changes have also recently been made in the monastery. The church belonging to the monastery contains the tomb of Pappenheim, the great general of the Thirty Years’ War, and other monuments. A very handsome railing divides the choir from the rest of the church.

In the small picture gallery is the much-repainted
THE TYN CHURCH Madonna by Albrecht Dürer, that once belonged to Rudolph, and a good Tiepolo. But the most interesting part of the building is the library.

It occupies several halls, in one of which are the very handsome bookshelves that were brought here from the suppressed Monastery of Klosterbruck. In one hall we see over the doors all shelves with wire grating, in which the books condemned by the Index, but which the monks read by special permission, were formerly contained. The library is very rich in Oriental MSS., incunables and early printed Bibles; among these is the priceless Utraquist Bohemian Bible, printed at Venice, the first edition of the celebrated Bible of Kralice, and a rare copy of the Biblia Pollyglotta Briani Waltoni in Latin, Hebrew, Samaritan, Greek, Chaldæan, Syrian, Arabic, Æthiopian and Persian. Though printed in London in 1657, it is dedicated to King Charles II. The view from the gardens of the Strahov Monastery is one of the finest in Prague.

On the left bank of the river also is the Capuchin Monastery on the Loretto Place and the church dedicated to St. Mary, which adjoins it. The buildings occupy the spot where the town residences of several Protestant nobles stood who were exiled after the Battle of the White Mountain. Princess Catherine of Lobkovic purchased the ground in 1625 and built here a chapel in imitation of the Santo Casa, and a, treasury^[4] which is the most valuable in Bohemia, and is far more interesting than the better known treasury of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. It consists mainly of donations of the seventeenth century, and most of the contents are in the rococo style.

‘The treasury was first founded by Catherine of Lobkovic, and was enriched by gifts if members of almost all the great Bohemian families. A crucifix, the gift of Cardinal Harrach, and a monstrance—said to contain 6580 diamonds—a foundation of Countess Kolovrat, are amongst the most interesting objects. The treasury contains also a very fine picture of the Madonna and Child, attributed in the catalogue to Albrecht Dürer, and said to have formed part of Rudolph collection.^[5] It is more probably a work of Adrian of Utrecht.’

The monastery was founded somewhat later, and the Church of St. Mary was built in 1661, and greatly enlarged by Countess Margaret of Waldstein in 1718.

On the right bank of the Vltava in the Vysehrad Street is the Emaus Monastery and Church of the Benedictines. It was founded in 1347 by Charles IV. to take the place of the ancient Slavic monastery of St. Prokop on the Sazava,^[6] where the Greek or Slavic ritual, which in Bohemia is more ancient than that of Rome, had been used. Charles had obtained the consent of Pope Clement VI. for his new foundation principally by stating that there were in Bohemia many dissidents and unbelieving men who, when the Gospel was expounded and preached to them in Latin, did not heed it, but who might be guided to the Christian faith by men of their own race. This foundation, as Palacky tells us, was, next to the University, the one that interested King Charles most. On his summons many Slavic monks from Croatia, Dalmatia and Bosnia assembled in the new monastery. Charles obtained for them the right of using the Slavonic language for their ecclesiastical functions, and employing the Cyrillic alphabet. The monastery possessed a valuable collection of MSS.
THE LIBRARY, STRAHOV that has been long dispersed. Its greatest treasure was an ancient Slavic MS. containing the evangel, which had once belonged to St. Prokop, the first abbot of the Sazava Monastery, and was traditionally reported to have been written by him. This valuable MS. was brought to France and—by one of history’s little ironies—became the texte du sacre used at the coronations of the Kings of France.^[7]

During the Hussite Wars the church and monastery were in the hands of the Utraquists, but it was restored to the Roman Catholics towards the end of the sixteenth century. We read that in 1592 riots near this church occurred, because the abbot had allowed his labourers to work on the 6th of July, which was then still a day sacred to the memory of John Hus.

The monastery still shows some traces of its antiquity. It contains two pictures that date from the time of Charles, and a Royal chapel, divided by a railing from the rest of the church. Over the entrance of the chapel is a portrait of Ferdinand III., who presented the monastery to the Benedictines of Mont Serrat. In the cloisters are some frescoes that also date from the time of Charles IV. Emaus was purchased in 1880 by German Benedictines, who have restored it with much care and good taste.

MOST ANCIENT ARMS OF
THE MALÁ STRANA

 

1. ‘Ecclesiam Sancti Viti quam Sanctus Wenceslaus construxerat ad similitudinem Romanae ecclesiae rotundam.’—Cosmas Pragensis|.
2. The old chronicler Cosmas always calls it ‘Sanctorum Martyrum Viti, Wenceslai atque Adalberti ecclesia.’
3. This legend forms the subject of a very fine poem by the gifted Bohemian poet, Svatopluk Cech. It has been admirably translated into German by the late Professor Albrecht.
4. Dr. Podlaha and Mr. Sittler have in the present year (1901) published a beautifully illustrated notice of the Loretto Treasury.
5. Rudolph was a great collector of Albrecht Dürer’s pictures; this perhaps accounts for this picture being—undoubtedly wrongly—attributed to Dürer.
6. See my History of Bohemian Literature, p. 93.
7. See Professor Léger’s L’Evangile de Rheims.