Klementinum: The Library That Once Burned Books
Why is it significant?
Walk along the long, plain wall of the Klementinum and try to guess how big it is. You cannot see the end of it from anywhere at street level.
Key Facts
| Place | Klementinum: The Library That Once Burned Books |
|---|---|
| Address | Klementinum 190, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08620, 14.41550 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk along the long, plain wall of the Klementinum and try to guess how big it is. You cannot see the end of it from anywhere at street level. After Prague Castle this is the largest complex of buildings in the city, a world of courtyards, chapels and towers that swallowed some thirty houses, gardens and lanes when the Jesuits built it.
The Jesuits arrived in 1556, invited by the Habsburgs to win Bohemia back to the Catholic faith, and they settled in an old Dominican monastery of St Clement... which is where the name comes from. They built a college, schools, a printing house, an observatory. In 1654 their academy was merged with Charles University into a single institution. Education was their weapon, and books were their battlefield.
Because books ran both ways. After the Protestant Bohemian estates lost the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, non-Catholic books were confiscated and burned across the country. The most notorious hunter was a Jesuit preacher, Antonín Koniáš, who compiled an index of forbidden Czech books. Legend credits him with burning around thirty thousand volumes. The number may be exaggerated, but in Czech his name became shorthand for a book burner.
And yet inside these walls hides one of the most beautiful libraries in the world, the Baroque Library Hall, finished in the 1720s: a long gallery of carved wooden shelves, gilded columns, painted ceilings and rows of old globes. Today the complex is the National Library of the Czech Republic, which keeps a copy of every book published in the country, including all the ones that were once condemned. High above, in the astronomical tower, the weather has been measured every day since 1775, one of the longest unbroken records anywhere.
So the place that burned books now guards them all. Prague loves that kind of irony, and Kafka would have enjoyed it. Leave through the courtyards to Karlova street and wind south through the lanes to Betlémské náměstí, where a plain white building with two steep gables is waiting.