Lesser Quarter Ring

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Lesser Quarter Ring
Malostranské námĕstí
Prague CoA CZ.svg
Square in Prague
Lesser Quarter Ring
Lesser Quarter Ring with Grömling-Palais and Nikolauskirche
Basic data
place Prague
District Lesser Town
Created 13th Century
Confluent streets Nerudova, Sněmovní, Tomášská, Letenská, Mostecká, Karmelitská
Buildings Nikolauskirche, Jesuit College, Plague Column, magnificent aristocratic palaces
use
User groups Public transport , pedestrian traffic , motor vehicles
Lesser Quarter Ring, view from the bell tower of the Nikolauskirche

The Lesser Quarter (Czech: Malostranské námĕstí ) is the center of the Lesser Town ( Malá Strana ), a district of the Czech capital Prague at the foot of the Prague Castle . It belongs to the Prague 1 administrative district . The square is dominated by the Church of St. Nicholas , a monumental baroque church in the middle of the square. Magnificent Renaissance and Baroque houses with characteristic arcades surround the Lesser Quarter Ring .

history

The originally independent Prague city of Lesser Town was founded by the Bohemian King Ottokar II. Přemysl in 1257. It was built in place of older settlements under Prague Castle, by the then only Vltava bridge ( Judith Bridge ). Right from the start, the Lesser Quarter Ring was its center. It served as a marketplace for the castle and as a public gathering place for Lesser Town citizens. The town hall was located here, and in the Middle Ages the gallows and pillory were also located here . The houses that surrounded the square belonged mostly to wealthy nobles who built representative houses under the castle.

After the heyday that the Lesser Town experienced under Charles IV and his successor, the town burned down almost completely in 1419 during the Hussite Wars and was abandoned for a few years. Another catastrophic fire destroyed large parts of the Lesser Town in 1541 and even affected the castle. The fire broke out in the Na Baště house (today the Sternberg Palace) on the Lesser Town Square. After the fires, the houses originally built in the Gothic style were rebuilt in the Renaissance style and later in the Baroque style. Today baroque facades are predominant, only a few original Renaissance facades have been preserved.

When the Jagiellonians moved the royal seat from the old town back to the castle in the 15th century and, especially when Emperor Rudolf II moved his residence from Vienna to Prague in the 16th century , the Lesser Town experienced a new boom. During this time, wealthy aristocratic families built magnificent palaces again on the Kleinseitner Ring.

A Gothic parish church has stood in the middle of the Lesser Quarter since the 13th century. After the victory of the Catholic Habsburgs in the Battle of the White Mountain and the onset of the Counter-Reformation , Emperor Ferdinand II awarded the church and the adjacent buildings to the Jesuits . After demolishing the existing buildings, they erected a large complex of buildings in the middle of the square, the Jesuit college. Adjacent to it, the monumental baroque church of St. Nicholas built.

The highest Bohemian state offices were located on the Lesser Quarter. After the Josephine reforms, however, the administration of Bohemian countries moved to Vienna and the nobility gradually left their residences on the Lesser Town. The district became impoverished and transformed into a district of smaller officials and craftsmen. For this reason, the Lesser Town was largely spared radical modernization during the building boom in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the ring has retained its historical shape to this day.

In 1883, a horse-drawn tram line was run across Mostecká Street (Mostecká ulice) to Lesser Town Square , and it was electrified in 1905. At the beginning of the 20th century, some houses on the south side were demolished in order to create a breakthrough to Karmelitská street (Karmelitská ulice) . Today, a busy tram line runs along the left bank of the Vltava across the Karmelitská and the lower part of the square .

The Lesser Quarter Ring is part of the so-called Königsweg . At the Church of St. Nicholas past and on via Nerudagasse (Nerudova ulice) the coronation processions of Bohemian kings used to go up to the castle.

Significant buildings

The Nikolauskirche divides the square

Church of St. Nicholas

The mighty baroque church of St. Nikolaus (Chrám svatého Mikuláše) with its 70 meter high dome - a masterpiece by Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer - and the slender bell tower dominate the Lesser Town ring. Together with the adjacent building complex of the former Jesuit college, it divides the ascending square into two halves: the upper part (west side) and the lower part (east side). The monumental building is one of the most important baroque church buildings in Europe. The interior is lavishly decorated with frescoes and sculptures.

Jesuit College

With the construction of the Jesuit college or profession house (Profesní dům) , a residential building for the highly placed members of the Order, the Jesuits began in 1673 after the one reported here building - several houses and the St. Wenceslas -Rotunde - were demolished. At the same time they also laid the foundation stone for the adjacent St. Nicholas Church. Construction began in the early Baroque style according to plans by Giovanni Domenico Orsi , was continued from 1674 under the direction of the Italian builder Anselmo Lurago and completed in 1692. After the dissolution of the Jesuit order, the building was redesigned for administrative needs. It was used by the German army during World War II. The Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University has been located here since the 1960s . After extensive reconstruction in 2000, concerts, conferences and other events are also held here.

Upper part (west side)

Upper part of the square: on the left the Liechtenstein-Palais, in the middle the Trinity Column

The upper part of the square was formerly Vlašský place (Vlašský plac) called. This referred to the Italian traders who mainly offered their goods here during the time of Emperor Rudolf II.

You can get to Prague Castle via Nerudagasse (Nerudova ulice) , which opens into the square at the northwest corner.

Palais Liechtenstein and Palais Hartig

The west side of the upper part is made up of the Lichtenstein Palace (Lichtenštejnský palác) , house no. 258/13, and the Hartig (Hartigovský palác) , house no. 259/12. Today they house the Prague Academy of Performing Arts and a student chamber theater (divadlo inspirace) .

The Palais Liechtenstein is named after Prince Karl I of Liechtenstein , who acquired the five houses originally located here in the 17th century and had them architecturally combined into one palace. The classical facade comes from a renovation in 1791. Prince Liechtenstein was appointed royal governor after the victory of the Habsburgs and directed the arrests and executions of the 27 leaders of the Bohemian estates .

Trinity Column

In the middle of the square there is the 20-meter-high Trinity Column or Plague Column (Morový sloup Nejsvětější Trojice) with representations of the Holy Trinity and with statues of the Virgin Mary and Czech saints. It was built to commemorate the surviving plague epidemic based on a design by Giovanni Battista Alliprandi in 1715. After the famine of 1772, it was supplemented by sculptures by the sculptor Ignaz Franz Platzer .

Lower part (east side)

Lower part of the square: on the left the Smiřický and Sternberg Palais, on the right the former Lesser Town Hall
Sternberg Palace
Smiřický Palace
Lesser Town Hall

At the southeast corner of the square empties the street Mostecká (Mostecká ulice) , about which one to Charles Bridge arrives.

Smiřický Palace

The Smiřický Palace ( Palác Smiřických , also called U Montágů ), house No. 6/18, stands on the north side of the lower part. The original Renaissance palace from the 16th century received two corner towers as part of a baroque renovation in the 17th century. In the 18th century it was redesigned and expanded according to plans by Josef Jäger . Here, in 1618, under the leadership of Albrecht Jan Smiřický, representatives of the Protestant Bohemian imperial estates met for a secret meeting and discussed how to proceed against the Habsburg supremacy. One day later, the so-called Second Prague Lintel followed , which led to the Bohemian class uprising . From 1895 the house belonged to the Bohemian Landtag . Between 1993 and 1996 the building was rebuilt to meet the needs of today's parliament .

Sternberg Palace

The Sternberg Palace (Šternberský palác) , house no. 7/19, on the north side of the lower part, was built in the 18th century through an architectural connection between two houses. You can still see this clearly on the uneven building front. A fire broke out in 1541 in the part of the building, the facade of which was set back (at that time the Na Baště house ), which affected the entire Lesser Town.

In the 18th century leading representatives of the so-called Czech national revival met here . In 1784 the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences (forerunner of the Czech Academy of Sciences ) and 12 years later the Society of Patriotic Art Friends in Bohemia were founded in the Sternberg Palace . With the establishment of the Society of the Patriotic Museum in Bohemia in 1818, the desire to build the Prague National Museum arose here.

Today the Palais Smiřický and Sternberg, together with other buildings in the neighborhood, serve as parliament buildings.

Lesser Town Hall

A striking building on the east side is house No. 35/21, which is adorned by three decorative towers. The house was built in 1470, looted and destroyed by the Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years War , and renovated in the Baroque style in 1630. It served as the Lesser Town Town Hall (Malostranská beseda) until 1784, when the formerly four independent Prague cities were united . In 1575 the Bohemian Confession was drawn up here, which representatives of the non-Catholic classes presented to the Emperor Maximilian II and which granted the country religious freedom for more than four decades. A plaque on the building commemorates this event. After extensive renovation work, the house was reopened in 2010 and today houses a cultural center with a theater and music hall and a gallery.

Kaiserstein Palace

On the east side is the Kaiserstein-Palais (Kaiserštejnský palác) , house no. 23/37, which was built in the 18th century by converting two former Renaissance houses according to plans by Giovanni Battista Alliprandi and Christoph Dientzenhofer . Its attic is adorned with statues of the four elements (fire, air, water, earth) by the Italian sculptor Ottavio Mosto. The opera singer Ema Destinová lived here from 1908 to 1914 . A bust and a memorial plaque from 1978 commemorate this. After an extensive reconstruction in 1977, the house is now used for conferences, exhibitions and concerts.

House to the stone table

On the west side, next to the former Jesuit college, a row of houses protrudes into the square. The most distinctive building is the House of the Stone Table (dům U kamenného stolu) , house no. 5/28, a rococo palace from 1786, also known as the Grömling palace (Grömlingovský palác) . The Lesser Quarter Café has been located on the ground floor of the palace since 1874 . It was a popular meeting place for artists, with regular guests from Prague writers like Franz Kafka and Max Brod and the opera singer Ema Destinová.

Radetzky monument

A monumental bronze monument to the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky by Joseph and Emanuel Max had stood in front of the palace since 1858 , which is why the lower part was also called Radetzky-Platz. In the years 1919–1920 the monument was dismantled and moved to the lapidarium of the National Museum . In the years 1928–1940, the monument to the French historian and bohemist Ernest Denis stood here . Since 2003 a memorial plaque and a bust on the neighboring house remind of him.

literature

  • František Ruth: Kronika královské Prahy a obcí sousedních (=  chronicle of the royal city of Prague and the neighboring towns ). Pavel Körber, Prague 1904, chapter: Malostranské náměstí, p. 685-708 (Czech, 1246 pp., Available online ).
  • Helmut Zeller, Eva Gruberová: CityTrip-plus Prague . Reise Know-How, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 978-3-8317-2633-2 , p. 177-180 (312 pp.).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Malostranský pomník maršála Radeckého Spolek Radecký Praha, November 30, 2011 (Czech). Retrieved October 17, 2019

Web links

Commons : Malostranské náměstí (Prague)  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 50 ° 5 ′ 17 ″  N , 14 ° 24 ′ 14 ″  E