Černín Palace
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly along the front of Černín Palace and count the columns. There are thirty of them, giant half-columns marching along a facade roughly a hundred and fifty metres long, the longest of any Baroque palace in Prague. This is not a house. It is a statement in stone.
Key Facts
| Place | Černín Palace |
|---|---|
| Address | Loretánské náměstí 5, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08870, 14.38950 |
| Part of Walk | Prague's Green Hill: Petřín Orchards, the Hunger Wall & Strahov's Painted Libraries |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly along the front of Černín Palace and count the columns. There are thirty of them, giant half-columns marching along a facade roughly a hundred and fifty metres long, the longest of any Baroque palace in Prague. This is not a house. It is a statement in stone.
It was begun in the late 1660s for Count Humprecht Jan Czernin, who had served as the emperor's ambassador in Venice and came home with Venetian ideas of grandeur. The ambition outlived the money. Over the following centuries the palace was plundered in wartime, decayed, and in the nineteenth century was sold to the state and used as army barracks. After 1918 it was restored for the Foreign Ministry of the new Czechoslovakia, and the ministry is still here today.
During the German occupation it housed the office of the Reich Protector. And on the morning of the tenth of March 1948, two weeks after the communist coup, it became the scene of the most famous death in modern Czech history. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, son of the country's founding president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, was found dead in the palace courtyard, beneath the window of his bathroom. He was the most prominent non-communist left in the new government.
Suicide, accident or murder? The regime announced suicide. Praguers quietly called it the third Prague defenestration. Investigations after 1989 came to different conclusions: one, in 2004, pointed to murder, while a later review left the question open. The courtyard is not open to visitors, but the question still hangs over this square, more than seventy-five years later.
History turned one more page here. In 1991, in Prague, the Warsaw Pact that had sent its tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968 was formally dissolved. Now turn around and look across the square at the small, sparkling Baroque facade facing the palace, a Marian shrine whose bells have rung over this square since the end of the seventeenth century. Cross over to it.