Bezdez, North Bohemia, April 14 (CTK) – Three precious wood-carvings that adorned the local Way of Sorrows, but disappeared for decades were unveiled to the public at the Bezdez Castle on Friday.
However, they will not stay there for the whole tourist season and the castle will only put them on display on exceptional occasions, castellan Kamil Seidl told CTK on Friday.
The royal Bezdez Castle is one of the most outstanding architectonic sights of the Liberec Region.
It dates back to the 1260s when it was founded by the King of Bohemia Ottokar II to protect the trading route from Prague to Zittau in Upper Lusatia.
“The chapels were at first adorned with paintings, but at the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th centuries, they were replaced with wood-carvings by an anonymous artist,” Milos Kadlec, director of the Regional Heritage Administration Sychrov, is quoted a saying.
The wood-carvings in the chapels survived the 18th and 19th centuries as well as World World Two, but in the 1950s and 1960s they started to vanish.
A Bezdez castellan carried the rest to the castle, but some more of them disappeared from there, too.
Some of the lost artefacts were later discovered and restored.
Last year, the wood-carvings “Simon of Cyrene Is Helping the Lord Jesus Carry the Cross” and “Lord Jesus Is Falling for the First Time before the Cross” were returned to the castle. Before this, they underwent a restoration.
