Strahov Monastery & its Library Halls

Why is it significant?

Step into the courtyard of Strahov Monastery and face the twin white towers of the basilica. So close to the castle, it feels more like a village square than a monument: cobbles, old trees, a small church to one side, and now and then a canon in a white habit crossing the yard.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Step into the courtyard of Strahov Monastery and face the twin white towers of the basilica. So close to the castle, it feels more like a village square than a monument: cobbles, old trees, a small church to one side, and now and then a canon in a white habit crossing the yard.

Strahov was founded in 1143 by Prince Vladislav the Second and Bishop Jindřich Zdík for the Premonstratensians, an order of canons who dress in white. It stood on the road into Prague from the west, a spiritual gateway to the city. Fires and wars damaged it again and again, and each time it was rebuilt, which is why a medieval monastery now wears a Baroque face. The story goes that in 1787 Mozart sat down at the organ of the basilica and improvised for the monks.

Its treasure is the library. The Theological Hall, from the 1670s, is a long, low vault covered in stucco and painted frames, lined with old leather bindings, with antique globes standing down the middle. The Philosophical Hall next door is a different world: walnut bookcases two storeys high, and a ceiling fresco painted in 1794 by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, a sky crowded with the thinkers of history, from Moses to Socrates. Maulbertsch was about seventy, and, they say, finished the whole ceiling in around six months.

Those walnut bookcases have their own secret. In the 1780s Emperor Joseph the Second dissolved hundreds of monasteries he considered useless. Strahov survived partly by presenting itself as a place of learning... and when the Moravian monastery of Louka was abolished, Strahov acquired its bookcases and built the Philosophical Hall to fit them. One monastery's death furnished another's masterpiece.

Strahov's luck ran out in 1950, when the communist regime closed it, expelled the canons and turned the buildings into a museum of literature. The order came back after 1989, and the books are still here, around two hundred thousand volumes. Now walk out through the gate towards Pohořelec and bear right into the long square in front of an enormous palace... where one of the darkest mysteries of 1948 took place.