Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
The Aichels were stonemasons, who had moved from the Italian Tyrol to Prague in 1630. They were clearly a respectable family: the architect Carlo Lurago was a witness at the birth of Jan Blažej’s father. During his short life (he died at 46), Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel brought his own individual talent to the prevailing baroque style, creating innumerable geometrical fantasies after the fashion of his hero, Francesco Borromini.
The first Cistercians in the Czech lands were monks from Bavaria who settled in the village of Sedlec during the 12th century, In their wake came German prospectors who discovered silver in the hills of...
The village of Chlumec, fifty miles east of Prague, came into the possession of the noble family of Kinský at the start of the seventeenth century. In 1721, Count František Ferdinand Kinský invited the baroque...
Originally a shrine to the Virgin built by the Cistercian order from nearby Plasy, the Church of the Annunciation at Mariánská Týnice rises impressively from the open countryside of Western Bohemia, just north of Plzeň. The...
The Benedictine convent of St George at Prague Castle was already long established when, in 1228, King Otakar I of Bohemia gifted the nearby village of Břežany to the nuns. The village, whose name comes...
Situated on the banks of the river Vltava about twenty miles north of Prague, the chateau of Veltrusy was commissioned in 1704 for the counts of Chotek. Work began around the year 1706 to a...
The high ground to the west of Prague called Bílá Hora was the scene of one of the earliest engagements of the Thirty Years’ War. The short but significant ‘Battle of the White Mountain’ of...
Legend has it that the ninth-century saints Cyril and Methodius baptized their first Moravian disciples in this wooded valley a few miles northeast of Brno (about 150 miles southeast of Prague). The village of Křtiny...
