St. Nicholas Church

The Church of St Nicholas dominates the Lesser Town of Prague with its great copper dome and slender bell tower, and inside it is often called the finest Baroque church in the city. Its walls seem to ripple: the façade curves in and out, and the nave is roofed by intersecting oval vaults that carry one continuous painted heaven above the visitor.

A Gothic parish church of St Nicholas stood here from the 13th century. After the Battle of White Mountain the Jesuits took it over, and in the second half of the 17th century they began a large college complex on the Lesser Town square to designs by Giovanni Domenico Orsi; the cornerstone of the new church was laid in 1673. The project was made possible largely by the Jesuit Václav Libštejnský of Kolowrat, who gave his whole fortune to it; the coat of arms on the façade, however, is that of his uncle František Karel, recorded as the builder. Construction went in two phases. Between 1703 and 1711 the west front and the first part of the nave rose to plans traditionally attributed to Christoph Dientzenhofer, although his authorship is not documented. From 1737 his son Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, the leading architect of Prague Baroque, added the last bay of the nave, the trefoil choir and the dome. He died in 1751, and his son-in-law Anselmo Lurago finished the bell tower in the following years.

The interior is a complete work of High Baroque art. The walls glow with real and artificial marble; the vast nave fresco of the miracles and apotheosis of St Nicholas, completed by Jan Lukáš Kracker in 1761, continues the real architecture into an illusionistic sky; and the dome and other vaults were painted by František Xaver Palko and Josef Kramolín. Monumental statues of saints and Church Fathers in white and gold are the work of Ignác František Platzer and his workshop, whose model was used for the gilded copper figure of St Nicholas above the high altar. The organ has more than 4,000 pipes, some up to six metres long, and Mozart played it in 1787. The church has been a national cultural monument since 1995.

The Lesser Town (Malá Strana) itself is the old quarter on the left bank of the Vltava below Prague Castle, a district of palaces, gardens and steep lanes.

Getting there

The church stands on Malostranské náměstí in Prague's Lesser Town, about 1.8 km from the centre of the Smíchov district. The nearest airport is Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG), about 10 km away.