Church of Our Lady before Týn

What you see

Two black Gothic towers bristling with small spires, rising behind a row of houses that completely block the church at street level. You have to walk through an archway to reach the door.

The story

The Týn Church is the most recognisable skyline of the Old Town, and its history is a story of religion and power. The first church here was Romanesque, connected with the nearby Týn Courtyard, the place where foreign merchants stayed, and it is mentioned in writing in 1135. It became a parish church as the Old Town grew, and was replaced around 1300 by an early Gothic one.

In the 1360s one of the first reform preachers, Konrád Waldhauser, was parish priest here. Then, in the middle of the fourteenth century, the parishioners, who were among the richest burghers of the city, started on a new, much larger Gothic basilica, with the help of wealthy families from other parishes. It was to be the main church of the Old Town.

The master builders came from the two great cathedral workshops of Prague, first Matthias of Arras and then Peter Parler. Parler's hand shows in the window tracery and in the east window, which is twenty-eight metres tall, and in the north portal, which has an unusually grand sculpted Passion in its tympanum. Some of these works may owe something to King Wenceslas the Fourth, whose new royal court was close by.

The new church was in use around 1380. The Hussite wars changed everything. Soon the church was taken over by the reformers, and it became one of the leading churches of the Utraquists, who took communion in both kinds.

From 1427 the preacher here was Jan Rokycana, elected archbishop in 1435 but never confirmed, a close collaborator of George of Poděbrady. When the church was nearly finished, they say that the timber ready for the roof was instead used to build gallows for the Hussite captain Jan Roháč of Dubá and fifty of his comrades, executed on the order of Emperor Sigismund, so the roof was finished only around 1457. George of Poděbrady, who had been elected king in the Old Town Hall, had the gable finished by 1463 and the north tower by 1466.

In a niche of the gable stood his statue with the motto Truth prevails and above it a golden chalice. When he died in 1471 he was buried next to Rokycana, and by his wish his heart was buried in the church. The south tower was completed in 1511 under King Vladislav Jagiellon, and both reach eighty metres.

After the Battle of White Mountain in 1620, the church went back to the Catholics, and the Hussite symbols had to go. According to Czech sources, in a secret night operation in 1623 the chalice and the statue of the king were torn down by a canon and a Jesuit, and Rokycana's tomb was destroyed, his remains burned in the square. Other sources give the date as 1626.

The story that the golden chalice was melted down and cast into a halo for the Virgin who replaced the king is a tradition. The replacement is a relief of the Madonna in a sunburst by Kašpar Bechteler. After the end of the Thirty Years' War the citizens began to put up altars in the new baroque style, among the first the main altar of 1649, a thank-you to the Virgin for the end of the war, as the Marian column was on the square.

Inside, the Gothic survivors include the baptismal font of 1414, the oldest and largest in Prague, a stone canopy from 1493, and two works by the Týn Calvary Master. The church is mostly baroque in its furnishing, with Karel Škréta's Assumption on the main altar and an organ from 1670 to 1673 by Jan Mundt, one of the three oldest preserved organs in Prague. Under a red marble slab, the astronomer Tycho Brahe is buried, and his tomb was opened in 1901 and again in 2010 to find out whether he was poisoned.

Popular legend says he died because good manners kept him at the emperor's table until his bladder burst, but what really killed him is debated. In the twentieth century, the façade lived behind scaffolding from about 1973 to 1988, which became part of the look of the place, and dozens or hundreds of tolerated illegal climbs took place on it. The long-serving pastor Jiří Reinsberg, who led the parish from 1946 to 1993, introduced liturgical reforms early, and the Communist regime tolerated the circle that gathered around him.

In 2017 the Czech bishops decided to restore the golden chalice to the gable, and a new one of gilded copper was made. Walk through the arcade in front of the church to see it. The two houses in front block the view of the portal, one of them the old Týn School.

Look up at the towers. Each is about eighty metres tall and crowned with eight smaller spires, set in two layers of four. Earlier churches stood here: a Romanesque building, then an early Gothic church of 1256.

In 1679 the present church was struck by lightning, and the fire damaged its old vault, which was later replaced by a baroque one.