Pilgrimage Church of St John of Nepomuk at Zelená Hora
Kostel svatého Jana Nepomuckého
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- Statues of three of Saint John's virtues crown the cloister gates: Purity with a candle, Temperance with a bowl and Faith holding a telescope.
- After the fire of 1784, repairs were allowed only if the church became a cemetery church; without private funding it faced demolition and the sale of its materials.
- Santini drew the whole design with a compass, building it from arcs of circles whose radii were multiples of a single basic module.
- The church rises in three storeys, which has been read as an allusion to the papal triple crown and to Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
- The central space is carried by ten pillars, and a ten-part gallery runs around the foot of the vault.
- A silver pilgrimage statue of Saint John, made in 1729 by the Prague goldsmith Jan Diesbach, disappeared after 1784.
- In 1725 Abbot Vejmluva commissioned the altar sculptures, including the five great angels, from the Chrudim sculptor Jan Pavel Čechpauer.
- Although it stands right by the historic border with Bohemia, the church lies on the Moravian side, near the former Cistercian monastery of Žďár.
- The church became state property in 1953 and was returned to the Catholic parish of Žďár nad Sázavou in 2014.
Why it is worth it
On a low hill called Zelená Hora, the Green Mountain, above the town of Žďár nad Sázavou, stands a church that seems to have been drawn with a compass and a star. Its ground plan is a five-pointed star, and around it runs a ring of cloisters whose outline forms a ten-pointed star, so that the whole composition is best understood from above. It was the last great work of Jan Blažej Santini-Aichel, the Prague architect of Italian descent who fused the Baroque with Gothic forms in a style all his own.
The church was built from 1719 for Václav Vejmluva, abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Žďár, who worked closely with the architect on its programme. The occasion was the cult of John of Nepomuk, the 14th-century priest drowned in the Vltava in Prague, whose remains were examined in 1719 in the run-up to his beatification; tissue found incorrupt was taken to be his tongue, which in popular tradition stood for his refusal to break the seal of confession. Tradition holds that five stars appeared over the water where his body lay, and Santini made the number five the key to the whole building: five points to the star, five entrances, five altar niches, and in the surrounding ring five chapels and five gates. The main altar, set in a tall arcade on the east side, shows the saint carried upward amid stars and angels. Santini also played with daylight: the central space is lit only at second hand, from brighter surrounding passages, so the structure itself seems to dissolve.
The church was consecrated within a few years of the start of work, and building of the cloisters continued after it. In 1784 a fire damaged the roof; permission to restore the church came in 1792 on the condition that the town's cemetery be moved to the hill. The church was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1994.
Getting there
Zelená Hora is about 2 km from the centre of Žďár nad Sázavou, a town with a railway station on the line between Havlíčkův Brod and Brno. The nearest airport is Pardubice Airport (PED), about 50 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Pilgrimage Church of Saint John of Nepomuk at Zelená hora is a religious building at the edge of Žďár nad Sázavou, Czech Republic, near the historical border between Moravia and Bohemia. It is the final work of Johann Santini Aichel, a Bohemian architect who combined the Borrominiesque Baroque with references to Gothic elements in both construction and decoration.
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