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This Mappu audio guide for Emmaus Monastery highlights Welcome to the Emmaus Monastery, Na Slovanech: A Slavic Monastery in Prague, and Eighty-Five Paintings and a Building Written Over Many Times, giving travelers a concise overview before exploring Prague.
Welcome to the Emmaus Monastery, in Czech the Emauzy, or the Emauzský klášter. You are standing at a Benedictine abbey in Prague, and one of the first things you notice is an apparent anachronism: two slender white towers with gilded spires, unmistakably modern, rising out of a medieval church. Hold on to that contrast, because it captures the whole story of this place — a very old monastery that has been built, damaged, rebuilt and reinterpreted. The abbey was founded in thirteen forty-seven by Charles the Fourth, King of Bohemia and later Holy Roman Emperor. It was completed and consecrated in thirteen seventy-two, by Archbishop Jan Očko of Vlašim, with Charles himself present, along with his son Wenceslaus and a company of distinguished guests. On that day the Gospel reading told of Christ meeting his disciples in the village of Emmaus, and that reading gave the monastery the name it still carries. In the Middle Ages the house was known as Na Slovanech, which means, roughly, at the Slavic place. What follows is drawn from the monastery's own account of its history, from the city's heritage records and from reference works; where something belongs to legend rather than to record, I will say so. Today the complex is listed as a national cultural monument, and it is still, in a modest way, a working monastery.
Charles the Fourth established a Benedictine house with a distinctive mission: celebrating the liturgy in a Slavic language. That is the meaning behind the medieval name Na Slovanech. It became a centre of learning, art and Slavic literature, and it drew students in the tradition of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the brothers associated with bringing Slavic literacy and Christianity to this part of Europe. Some accounts also link the reformer Jan Hus to the scholars here, though that connection is repeated more often than it is firmly documented. Accounts link the Reims Gospel to Charles the Fourth and this foundation. The manuscript later reached France and is now catalogued in Reims's municipal library collection. Its journey is one of the intriguing threads to follow from the abbey's Slavic mission. In fourteen nineteen the Hussites took over the monastery. It became the only Bohemian monastery to practise Communion under both kinds — bread and wine offered to the whole congregation. By most accounts, the Hussite period was a time of decline for the house.
In the thirteen sixties, the cloisters here were decorated with a cycle of eighty-five Gothic wall paintings, pairing scenes from the Old Testament with scenes from the New. Those frescoes were damaged in the twentieth century and restored after nineteen forty-seven, so what you see today is medieval work and modern conservation standing side by side. The building itself is a palimpsest, a page written over several times. The original design is High Gothic: pointed arches, ribbed vaults, long elegant cloisters, often praised as a pearl of Bohemian Gothic architecture. The monastery was also built beside a small, older parish church dedicated to Saints Cosmas and Damian, which tradition says was founded by Saint Wenceslas himself — a claim that belongs to legend rather than to documents. After that, the layers multiply. In sixteen thirty-five, Benedictines from the Spanish monastery of Montserrat arrived, introduced to Bohemia by Emperor Ferdinand the Third. They brought the devotion to Our Lady of Montserrat and rebuilt parts of the complex, while preserving the cloister and much of the church. Later, monks from Beuron in Germany found refuge here during Bismarck's anti-clerical campaign: the Baroque furnishings and paintings were removed, and the towers' onion domes were replaced with sharp spires.
For most of its history this was a place of quiet study. The twentieth century broke that quiet in the most violent way. During the Second World War the Nazi authorities dissolved the community in nineteen forty-one. Its abbot, Arnošt Vykoukal, died at Dachau in nineteen forty-two. Then, on the fourteenth of February, nineteen forty-five, a United States bombing raid on Prague hit the complex. The monastery and church were badly damaged, and the church lost its roof and its towers. The recovery took decades, and it is remarkable in its own right. Immediately after the raid, an association for the renewal of the Emmaus Monastery began securing the site, with the support of ordinary citizens. The damaged Gothic frescoes in the cloister were restored after nineteen forty-seven, and a new reinforced concrete roof frame was built. In nineteen sixty-four an open architectural competition was held to design a replacement for the destroyed roof and towers of the church. The result is what you see now: a bold concrete roof and those slender white towers with gilded spires, unmistakably of their decade, sitting on a medieval church. In nineteen ninety the monastery was returned to the Benedictine order.
So, step back and look at what you have in front of you. A monastery founded by an emperor who wanted a Slavic voice in the heart of his capital. Eighty-five Gothic paintings that survived fire and rebuilding. A church roof that a nineteen sixties competition reinvented as something close to sculpture. Before you go, here is a thread worth pulling. The Reims Gospel connects the abbey's Slavic tradition with a manuscript now catalogued in Reims's municipal library collection. Its journey is worth exploring through the library's manuscript records. And here in the cloister, there are eighty-five paintings to read slowly, panel by panel, like a long conversation between two testaments. If you find the doors open, take a quiet moment. This is one of the calmer corners of a busy city, and it is still a place where people pray, study and repair what has been broken. Let the white towers be the last thing you see as you walk away — and carry one question with you: what gets rebuilt, by whom, and why?
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It covers Na Slovanech: A Slavic Monastery in Prague, Eighty-Five Paintings and a Building Written Over Many Times, and From the Gestapo to the White Towers, with practical context and details to notice during the visit.
Charles the Fourth established a Benedictine house with a distinctive mission: celebrating the liturgy in a Slavic language. That is the meaning behind the medieval name Na Slovanech. It became a centre of learning, art and Slavic literature, and it drew students in the tradition of Saints Cyril and Methodius, the brothers associated with bringing Slavic literacy and Christianity to this part of Europe.
You can continue with follow-up questions such as "Charles the Fourth founded this monastery in thirteen forty-seven as a house where the liturgy was celebrated in a Slavic language — what did that choice signal about Prague in his reign?", then keep the guide connected to your map and trip plan.
