Prague, July 22 (CTK) – Teachers and students at Prague’s Teaching Faculty promote Czech convents and monasteries as tourist destinations and places offering history knowledge as well as calm relax on a new website, Klášterní stezky, one of the authors, Radka Ranochova, has told CTK.
Presenting thorough information on more than 20 monasteries and convents owned by the state, the church or other subjects, the website acquaints visitors with religious orders’ life and the ongoing reconstruction of historical religious buildings by the church.
“We interconnect the scientific and non-scientific fields, we cooperate with monastery wardens. It is not our ambition to make an encyclopaedic review of monasteries. We want to present the selected ones thoroughly and put emphasis on education,” Ranochova said.
The first convent to be established in the Czech Lands was that affiliated with the St George Basilica at Prague Castle. It was established in the 10th century and it harboured Benedictine nuns.
Later in the 10th century, the first monastery, also Benedictine, was established in Brevnov, now a western neighbourhood of Prague.
Further Benedictine convents and monasteries mushroomed in the following three centuries. Simultaneously, new religious orders started appearing in the country in the 11-12th centuries, the Premonstratensians, Cistercians, Dominicans and Franciscans being the most important of them.
After the medieval Hussite wars, monasterial culture flourished again during the re-Catholisation period in the first half of the 17th century, but it was suppressed in the 18th-century Enlightenment era. The post-WWII developments dealt another blow to it. Religious orders’ life in convents and monasteries was resumed only after the 1989 collapse of the communist regime.
Some surviving orders have a few members only, while others try to follow up old traditions and produce and sell various products including beer from their own breweries.
Some convents and monasteries offer accommodation and also stays with various programmes. For example, the Discalced Carmelites’ monastery in Slany, central Bohemia, offers the visitors a chance to become a monk for a week, including the experience of silence and detachment from everyday life.
