The Loreta, Prague

In the courtyard stands a small stone house. It is a copy of the house in Nazareth where the Angel Gabriel is said to have appeared to Mary — the house that angels, in the legend, carried through the air to Italy. Around it: a two-storey cloister, a Rococo church, a carillon of twenty-seven bells that has run on the same principle since the 1690s, a crucified woman with a beard, and a monstrance carrying 6,222 diamonds that came off a countess’s dress.

What a Loreta is, and why Bohemia has so many

The story begins in Italy. The Santa Casa at Loreto in the Marche is believed by Catholic tradition to be the house of the Holy Family from Nazareth, brought to Italy by angels in the thirteenth century — the prosaic version has it shipped stone by stone, possibly by a family called Angeli, which may be the whole legend in one surname. Around it grew one of the great pilgrimages of Europe, and around Europe grew copies.

Bohemia has more of them than anywhere. The type arrived in the 1580s with noblemen who had made the pilgrimage — the first was at Horšovský Týn in 1584 — but the boom came after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, when loretas became instruments of Marian devotion and of re-Catholicising a country that had been largely Protestant. Something like a hundred were built; about sixty survive.

This one was paid for by Countess Benigna Kateřina of Lobkowicz, who gave the land, took her model from the loreta at Mikulov, and handed the running of it to the Capuchins — who have had it ever since, apart from the state years of 1950 to 1990, and have it again now. Building began in 1626; the Santa Casa was consecrated on 25 March 1631, the Feast of the Annunciation, which is the feast of the house itself. The architect was the Italian Giovanni Battista Orsi. 2026 is its four hundredth anniversary.

The Dientzenhofers, and the front you see

The complex grew for a century. Christoph Dientzenhofer remodelled the cloister chapels in 1710–17 and began the great west front; after his death in 1722 his son Kilián Ignác finished it and, in 1747–50, added the cloister’s upper storey. The balustrade in front carries nineteen statues and nine groups of putti — many of them modern copies, the originals having gone to the National Museum’s Lapidarium.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

Arrive five minutes before the hour

The carillon plays on the hour, from ten until five. Stand on the terrace of the Černín Palace opposite — the Czech foreign ministry, and the best view of the front there is — wait for the bells, and then cross the square and go in. Most visitors walk past at twenty past and never hear it.

The carillon

It was the gift of a Lesser Town merchant, Eberhard von Glauchau. The twenty-seven playing bells were cast by the Amsterdam town founder Claude Fremy between 1683 and 1691 — Fremy inherited the Hemony workshop, the greatest carillon foundry of the age. Thirty bells are usually said to hang in the tower against twenty-seven that play, which is why you will see both numbers quoted.

The Prague clockmaker Peter Neumann tied the bells to the tower clock with a pinned metal cylinder — a barrel studded with pegs, exactly like a music box — and that is still how it works. At the consecration in 1695 every bell had an aristocratic sponsor and Emperor Leopold I stood godfather to the first. There is a keyboard too, and on feast days a player climbs up and performs whole pieces by hand.

One correction worth making, because every older guidebook gets it wrong: for more than a century the machine played the hymn Tisícekráte pozdravujem tebe. Since 20 May 2020 it has played a different one, Maria, Maria, nad slunce jasnější. The change was made by Radek Rejšek, keeper of the carillon since 1989, who had to reposition the pegs on the cylinder by hand from written music — a technique which, by his account at the time, had effectively been lost, because the people who knew it had died.

The Santa Casa

Through the front building into the courtyard, and there it is: a small house standing free, ringed by the cloister. The outside is dense with relief — prophets in niches, and scenes from the legend of the house and its flight.

Inside, in the Italian manner, the plaster is deliberately fragmentary and the brickwork deliberately rough: this is meant to look like a poor house, not a chapel. Beams and bricks brought from the Italian Loreto are said to be built into the walls — the claim is always hedged, even in Czech sources, so treat it as tradition. On the altar stands the Loreto Black Madonna, carved in wood and darkened, dressed in ceremonial robes on feast days; the four gilt-silver crowns made for her and the Child in 1723 and 1735 are in the treasury.

The cloister, and the bearded saint

The cloister runs round all four sides with chapels at the corners and in the middle of each range, hung with the saints people prayed to against particular illnesses and troubles, each with a prie-dieu in front of it. The Chapel of St Francis Seraphicus holds a Stigmatization of St Francis by Petr Brandl, a major Bohemian Baroque canvas that most visitors walk straight past.

And in the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows hangs the thing nobody forgets: a crucified woman with a beard. She is St Starosta in Czech, Wilgefortis in Latin, Kümmernis in German, Uncumber in English. The legend: a young noblewoman, betrothed against her will to a pagan king, prayed to be made repulsive, sprouted a beard, and was crucified by her furious father. She became the saint women prayed to for deliverance from a violent husband.

The truth is better. Art historians are fairly clear that she is a misreading of a picture. The Volto Santo of Lucca is a medieval crucifix showing a bearded Christ in a long full-length tunic. Copies travelled north to people who had never seen a robed Christ, who looked at a figure in a dress with a beard, concluded it was a woman, and invented a life to explain her. The cult was suppressed from the late sixteenth century and she has no place in the modern calendar. She is a fossil of popular religion, and this is one of the best places in Europe to meet her.

The Church of the Nativity

On the axis behind the Santa Casa, and by the Loreta’s own account one of the best-preserved Rococo interiors in Prague. Christoph Dientzenhofer began the rebuilding; J. J. Aichbauer finished it in 1735, and it was consecrated on 7 June 1737, paid for largely by Countess Maria Margarethe Waldstein.

Two things to look at. In the chancel are the reliquary cases of SS Felicissimus and Marcius — catacomb saints, skeletons dressed and displayed, which is not what most visitors expect in a pretty pink-and-gold church. And look up over the chancel: the vault fresco there, the Presentation of Christ in the Temple, is by Václav Vavřinec Reiner and is markedly better than the nave paintings — a judgement the Loreta itself makes on its own website.

The crypt, discovered in 2011

The newest thing here, and almost no guidebook mentions it. In 2011 a forgotten crypt of benefactors was found under the church, its walls entirely covered in murals painted in 1664 in black and grey alone: skeletons, skulls, allegories of Time, Death and Resurrection — the Baroque ars moriendi, the art of dying well. The main scene, a Raising of Lazarus, is copied from a Rembrandt etching, made while Rembrandt was still alive. Nobody has entered the real crypt since the late eighteenth century; what you walk into is a full replica, part of the permanent exhibition.

The treasury, and the Prague Sun

Upstairs, and save time for it: after the treasure of St Vitus this is the second most valuable church treasury in the country, several hundred objects assembled from 1626 onwards. Its own twentieth-century history, as the Loreta tells it, is a thriller — bricked up in the cellars to hide it from the Nazis, confiscated by the Communist state around 1950 and dispersed, put back together over the years that followed, and restored to the Capuchins after 1990.

There is a whole family of monstrances: the great pearl monstrance of 1740, hundreds of drilled pearls threaded on silver wire; a small one hung with irregular baroque sea pearls; a coral one; and the Ring Monstrance of 1748, made from the votive rings pilgrims left at the Madonna’s altar.

And then the Prague Sun. It is a monstrance more than ninety centimetres high, weighing over twelve kilograms, in which the vessel appears to float inside a blaze of diamond rays carried by a figure of the Virgin. It was designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, the imperial court architect, and made in Vienna by the goldsmith Känischbauer and the jeweller Stegner, reaching Prague under armed military escort in 1699.

It carries 6,222 diamonds. They came from a bequest of 1695 by Countess Ludmila Eva Františka Kolowrat, who left the Loreta the gold, silver and stones for it — roughly six and a half thousand diamonds, the surplus paying the craftsmen. The story everyone tells is that they came off her wedding dress. Her portrait in wedding clothes, wearing diamonds, hangs here; and the Loreta’s own curator says plainly that the wedding-dress story is not documented. It is a lovely tradition, and probably grew out of the picture.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The carillon on the hour Twenty-seven bells of the 1680s, still driven by a pegged cylinder. Best heard from the Černín Palace terrace opposite.
• St Starosta, the bearded saint In the Chapel of Our Lady of Sorrows: a crucified woman with a beard, invented by people misreading a picture.
• The Prague Sun 6,222 diamonds, designed by Fischer von Erlach, in the treasury upstairs. Brought from Vienna under military escort in 1699.
• The crypt replica Murals of 1664 in black and grey, found in 2011, with a Lazarus copied from Rembrandt in Rembrandt's own lifetime.
• Reiner's ceiling in the chancel The best painting in the Church of the Nativity, and directly above the heads of people photographing the altar.
• The pearl monstrance 1740, and hundreds of individually drilled pearls threaded on wire.
• The Brandl in the cloister A Stigmatization of St Francis by the leading Bohemian Baroque painter, in a chapel most people walk through.

Insider tips

Pace yourself for the treasury. Most people spend their energy in the cloister and give the Prague Sun five minutes; it should be the other way round. Note too that the shop beside it often closes between noon and one.

Chain it geographically: tram 22 to Pohořelec, Strahov first (the tram has done the climbing for you), then downhill to the Loreta, then the quiet lanes of Nový Svět, then Hradčanské náměstí and the Castle. Every leg is downhill.

Photography no longer needs a permit — that changed, and the older guidance is wrong — but flash and tripods are still out.

Check the events calendar before choosing a day. There are organ concerts in the Church of the Nativity on Saturday afternoons, and on feast days the carillon is sometimes played live from the keyboard rather than by machine.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Hradčany is the quietest quarter in central Prague and has almost no restaurants; the nearest cluster is up at Pohořelec, including the Strahov monastery brewery, which does the best-value lunch on this hill. For staying, Hradčany and the upper end of Malá Strana are calm and beautiful and a walk from everything; the Old Town is livelier and much noisier.

More churches in Prague

• Strahov Monastery — five minutes uphill, for the two library halls.
• Basilica of St George — in the Castle, and seven hundred years older than anything here.
• St Nicholas, Malá Strana — downhill, and the great Baroque interior of the city.

See all the churches worth visiting in Prague →