Michna Palace (Tyrš House)
Why is it significant?
Stand in front of the long Baroque palace at the corner of Újezd and look at its stately front, its courtyard and the garden reaching towards Kampa. A nobleman's dream house, you would think.
Key Facts
| Place | Michna Palace (Tyrš House) |
|---|---|
| Address | Újezd 450/40, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08350, 14.40530 |
| Part of Walk | Prague's Secret Lesser Town: Kampa, the Devil's Stream & the Embassy Garden of 1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in front of the long Baroque palace at the corner of Újezd and look at its stately front, its courtyard and the garden reaching towards Kampa. A nobleman's dream house, you would think. Then you notice the word Sokol, falcon, and the name Tyršův dům, Tyrš House, and the story turns in a completely unexpected direction.
The palace was rebuilt in the seventeenth century for Pavel Michna of Vacínov, one of the great winners of the Thirty Years' War. After the Protestant defeat at White Mountain in 1620, the estates of the losers were confiscated, and men like Michna grew enormously rich, partly through a notorious consortium that debased the kingdom's silver coinage. He wanted a palace to match his new rank, and the Italian architect Francesco Caratti gave him one.
Fortunes made that fast rarely last. The family did not hold on to its glory, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the palace ended up serving the army as an arsenal and storehouse, slowly falling apart.
Then, in the early 1920s, it was bought by Sokol, the Czech gymnastics movement, founded in 1862 by Miroslav Tyrš and Jindřich Fügner. Sokol was never only about sport. Under the Habsburgs it trained a nation in discipline and self-confidence; its members, in their red shirts, marched in huge displays of synchronised exercise, the slets. The palace was restored and named after Tyrš, and it is still the headquarters of the movement today.
Every regime that feared free citizens feared Sokol. The Nazis banned it and sent many of its leaders to concentration camps. The communists took it over and then shut it down. It came back to life after 1989, in this very building. Now walk south along Říční street, the River Street, a quiet lane parallel to Újezd. Halfway along, a tiny white church hides a name that makes everyone smile.