Loreta and its Carillon
Why is it significant?
Stand in front of the Loreta and wait for the hour. High in the tower above the entrance, a set of bells begins to play a slow Marian hymn, clear and a little melancholy, and the sound drifts across the square to the stern columns of the palace opposite.
Key Facts
| Place | Loreta and its Carillon |
|---|---|
| Address | Loretánské náměstí 7, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08930, 14.39150 |
| Part of Walk | Prague's Green Hill: Petřín Orchards, the Hunger Wall & Strahov's Painted Libraries |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in front of the Loreta and wait for the hour. High in the tower above the entrance, a set of bells begins to play a slow Marian hymn, clear and a little melancholy, and the sound drifts across the square to the stern columns of the palace opposite.
Loreta was founded in 1626 by a noblewoman, Kateřina of Lobkowicz, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, when the Habsburgs were bringing Bohemia back to Catholicism after the Protestant defeat at White Mountain in 1620. At its heart stands a copy of the Santa Casa, the Holy House of the Virgin Mary, which, according to legend, angels carried from Nazareth to the Italian town of Loreto. Copies of it sprang up all over Central Europe, and this became the most famous of them.
The bells were a gift from a Prague merchant, Eberhard Glauch, cast in Amsterdam by the bell founder Claudius Fremy. There are twenty-seven of them, and they have been playing over Hradčany since the 1690s. Behind the facade, rebuilt by the Dientzenhofers in the 1720s, the treasury keeps the most dazzling object in Prague: a monstrance made in Vienna in 1699 and known as the Prague Sun, set with 6,222 diamonds.
And look for the strangest saint in the building. In one of the corner chapels of the cloister hangs a crucified woman... with a beard. She is Saint Starosta, also called Wilgefortis, a legendary princess who prayed to be made ugly so that she would not have to marry a pagan king. Her prayer was answered with a beard, and her furious father had her crucified. The Church quietly dropped her from the calendar long ago, but here she still hangs.
The Loreta has played its hymn through wars, occupations and revolutions, and it is one of the sounds that defines this quiet end of Prague. Now leave the square at its northern end, past the plain walls of the Capuchin monastery, and walk down Černínská street. In a minute you will step into a lane that time seems to have forgotten.