Bethlehem Chapel (Prague)
The Bethlehem Chapel ( Betlémská kaple in Czech ) is one of the many remarkable buildings in Prague's old town . It is located in the Josefstadt district .
architecture
It is a simple hall structure, striking in the street scene with its distinctive Gothic double gable. The large rectangular church interior with high arched windows and a wooden beamed ceiling is closed off by two gable roofs. The architecture of the building says it all. The center of the great hall is not the altar, but the pulpit. The Bethlehem Chapel was built as a sermon church , not to celebrate mass. So there was no tabernacle either . Because of this specialization of worship on the word, it is called a chapel and not a church, despite its size . The Bethlehem Chapel is an interesting forerunner of the Protestant preaching church. The Bethlehem Chapel did not acquire its great importance because of its architecture, but as the scene of the first phase of the Czech Reformation.
history
founding
The founding of the Bethlehem Chapel goes back to two residents of Prague, the shopkeeper Jan Kříž and the knight Hanuš von Mühlheim (Johann von Mühlheim from Pardubitz). In the founding document of May 24, 1391, it was stipulated that the sermon should be the core of the worship service and that the building would be erected so that there would also be a place in Prague where people are preached in their mother tongue, i.e. in Czech: “The merciful The Lord, who left the wholesome food in the seed of his word for his godly ones, decided that his word should not be chained, but freely proclaimed in his church. So this chapel was named after Bethlehem, which means 'House of Bread', because it is here that the common people and the faithful of Christ are to be satisfied with the bread of the holy sermon. ”The appointment of a minister for the chapel should be made by the professors of the university and the mayor take place together. Construction was completed in 1394. The first preacher was Master Stephan from Kolin.
Protestant Sermon Church
In 1402 the Magister Jan Hus was appointed preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel. He reached the masses with his rousing sermons in the mother tongue of the Czech population of Prague. Up to 3,000 people are said to have followed his sermons in the Bethlehem Chapel. Hus, influenced by the theology of John Wyclif , criticized the abuses in the church of his time. On March 9, 1410, Pope Alexander V issued a bull against Hus. But despite the ban on preaching, he continued to preach at the Bethlehem Chapel with great approval from the Prague population. When the city of Prague was interdict a little later because of Hus , the pressure on him grew. In 1412 he had to leave the city. With that the time in which the Bethlehem Chapel played a certain role in the (church) politics of the whole Christian West is over.
But even after Hus was burned at the Council of Constance (July 6, 1415), the Bethlehem Chapel under his successor Jakobellus von Mies (1414–1429) remained a center of reformatory efforts in Bohemia and a place for Hussite sermons. The fact that Thomas Müntzer preached here on June 23, 1521 during a stay in Prague shows that the fame of the chapel as a Protestant preaching site had not faded even after more than a hundred years , not in Czech but in Latin.
Another century later, after Rudolf II's letter of majesty with Brother Cyrus, who was appointed to his office on December 4, 1609, a member of the Bohemian Brothers became preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel for the first time .
Catholic chapel, partial demolition and model of Protestant churches
With the battle of the White Mountain (November 8, 1620) and the ensuing re-Catholicization in Bohemia, the fate of the Bethlehem Chapel also changed. In 1622 it passed into the possession of the Jesuit order . From 1638 to 1661 the chapel was owned by the University of Prague . In 1661 the Jesuits turned the Bethlehem Chapel into a Catholic church.
In 1786 the Bethlehem Chapel was desecrated and soon afterwards partially demolished. A tenement house was built in their place using the existing walls. This seemed to seal the fate of this historic building.
Even if there was no longer a Bethlehem Chapel in Prague at that time, there were still Bethlehem churches of Protestant Czechs, for example in Berlin. The Church of the Bohemian Exiles in Berlin's Friedrichstadt Bethlehem Church was deliberately named after the great model in Prague . This church, built between 1735 and 1737 under the direction of Friedrich Wilhelm Diterichs , was located on Mauerstraße at the corner of Krausenstraße. It was destroyed in World War II and later demolished. The name change of the Rixdorf village church in the Berlin district of Neukölln , which has been called Bethlehem Church since 1912, goes back to the Prague Bethlehem Chapel.
reconstruction
After the Second World War, it was left to the communists to return the Bethlehem Chapel to the Prague cityscape. The historiography of that time tied in with the importance of the building as a place of national identity and the resistance of the masses against the feudal society of the late Middle Ages. The communist prime minister of the ČSR Klement Gottwald justified the reconstruction with the words: "Even half a millennium ago, Prague people fought for communism."
Taking into account old documents and after a thorough archaeological investigation, the new Bethlehem Chapel with the preacher's house was reconstructed on the old foundations under the direction of the architect Jaroslav Fragner in the years 1950–1954, using the preserved wall fragments. In principle, the current Bethlehem Chapel is a new building, only the door through which Hus entered the pulpit has been preserved in the original.
In 1987 the Czech Technical University in Prague took over the chapel. She had it reconstructed at her own expense. The decoration of the walls of the hall consists of replicas of the original paintings, texts of Hussite songs from the valuable hymn book of Jistebnice and wall paintings from the Council of Constance. The exhibition belonging to the Bethlehem Chapel was fundamentally redesigned after the Velvet Revolution . The ceremonial reopening took place on March 26, 1992. In keeping with university tradition, the Bethlehem Chapel is now the ballroom of the Czech Technical University.
In 2015 the asteroid (90892) Betlémská kaple was named after the chapel.
literature
- Jiří Otter: The first united church in the heart of Europe. The Evangelical Church of the Bohemian Brethren. Prague 1991.
- The Bohemians in Berlin 1732–1982. An exhibition by the Berlin State Archives. Exhibition catalog Berlin 1982.
- Rudolf Říčan: The Bohemian Brothers. Its origin and its history. With a chapter on the theology of the brothers by Amedeo Molnár. Berlin 1961.
- Franz Strunz: Johannes Hus. His life and his work. Munich 1927.
- Joseph Theodor Müller: History of the Bohemian Brothers. 3 volumes. Herrnhut 1922–1931.
Web links
- The Bethlehem Chapel Official Website
- Virtual tour of ČVUT
- Bethlehem Chapel Tourism portal of the city of Prague
Individual evidence
Coordinates: 50 ° 5 ′ 4 ″ N , 14 ° 25 ′ 3 ″ E