Emmaus Monastery: The Slavonic Abbey with Concrete Sails
Why is it significant?
Tilt your head back and look at the church roof: instead of Gothic towers, two tall, curved white blades rise from it, crossing like sails or like hands about to clap. Underneath them sits a sober medieval church. The two belong together more than you would think.
Key Facts
| Place | Emmaus Monastery: The Slavonic Abbey with Concrete Sails |
|---|---|
| Address | Vyšehradská 49, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.07220, 14.41630 |
| Part of Walk | Vyšehrad: Princess Libuše, Cubist Houses and the Nation's Cemetery in Prague |
| Generated | Generated |
Tilt your head back and look at the church roof: instead of Gothic towers, two tall, curved white blades rise from it, crossing like sails or like hands about to clap. Underneath them sits a sober medieval church. The two belong together more than you would think.
In 1347 the emperor Charles IV founded this monastery for an unusual community: Benedictine monks who celebrated the liturgy not in Latin but in Old Church Slavonic, the language of the missionaries Cyril and Methodius, brought here from Croatia with their own alphabet, the angular Glagolitic script. Charles wanted Prague to be a bridge between the Latin West and the Slavic world, and this monastery was his statement of it. The church was consecrated in the 1370s, on the Monday after Easter, when the Gospel tells of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Hence the name, Emauzy.
The monks also copied books. Part of a gospel book written in Glagolitic here in 1395 later made its way to the cathedral of Reims, in France. For generations, French tradition held that kings swore their coronation oath on it, without anyone in the room being able to read a word.
On 14 February 1945, the same mistaken American raid that struck the bridge hit the monastery. The Gothic towers were wrecked, and for twenty years the church stood with a broken roof. In 1967, the architect František Maria Černý gave it these modern concrete spires, a bold choice in a Communist country that had, in 1950, already expelled the monks.
After 1989 the Benedictines returned. Inside the cloister, fragments of fourteenth-century wall paintings still survive, faded but alive. Now walk back down to the river and follow the embankment south, upstream, towards the railway bridge. Just before it, look for a small old house with a steep roof that seems to have wandered in from a village.