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Prague’s renewed Marian Column to contain stone from India

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Prague, July 13 (CTK) – The new Marian column to be reinstalled in Prague’s Old Town Square on the centenary of its Baroque predecessor’s removal next year will be made of special hard sandstone imported from abroad, including India, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) wrote on Thursday.

The paper describes the twists and turns and controversies the project has faced since the very beginning.

The original column, with a statue of the Virgin Mary at the top of it, was christened by the Prague archbishop in the Old Town Square in 1652 under the aegis of Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia Ferdinand III.

It was the first Baroque work of art in Bohemia and the third monument of its kind in Europe, the first two being in Rome and Munich, the paper writes.

In November 1918, in the wake of WWI end and the establishment of Czechoslovakia, it was pulled down and destroyed by a crowd settling accounts with the collapsed Austro-Hungarian monarchy and the Habsburg dynasty.

Only several fragments, including torsos of four angels, were left of the column, which are part of the National Museum’s collections now.

Next year, the column’s replica is to be installed as a symbol of reconciliation after a century. It will be 15 metres tall and weigh 118 tonnes, MfD writes.

For sculptor Petr Vana, who heads the team working on the new column, the task, including the search of a suitable stone material, has been “a wonderful adventure” in the past 20 years.

The original column was made of a special hard and resistible sandstone mined in a quarry in Kamenne Zehrovice, central Bohemia.

The quarry has been long defunct now, which is why the authors sought the necessary stone at various places.

“We have uncovered a sample of hard sandstone at a stonework trade fair in Hamburg, for example,” Vana said, adding that some material was even imported from India.

In the course of years, the column’s reinstallation project acquired a political dimension, of which its authors are well aware, the daily writes.

Less than in the Virgin Mary statue, the problem rests in the plinth decorated by four angels. Out of them, three are uncontroversial, symbolising the protection against famine, war and poverty. The fourth angel, the fighter against heresy, is problematic. After consulting both Catholic and Protestant church dignitaries, the authors opted for a compromise.

“The angel will hold a cartouche reading ‘Renewed in the memory of reconciliation and in homage to the Virgin Mary’,” Vana told the daily.

The original column is an excellent work by Jan Jiri Bendl (1610-1680), a German-born Czech sculptor, historian Emanuel Poche said.

In 1723, the first public lighting system in Prague, comprised of 330 oil lamps, was installed in the column’s surroundings, Poche said.

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