Today he is called Gabriel Loci. This monumental complex with its characteristic brick facade reminiscent of an old English mansion towering on the slopes of Petřín in Prague’s Smíchov is familiar to visitors of the Designblok festival, filmmakers, artists who have studios here, and those who come here these weeks to the summer cinema. Originally, however, it was the monastery of St. Gabriel, where at the end of the 19th century. century, the nuns of the Benedictine Beuron Congregation found asylum.
It is the mysterious word Beuron that is key to the story of the building – it makes it a unique cultural monument that is unparalleled in the world. The past of the long-abolished monastery is now forgotten by most people. But just as exciting are the questions about his future. After decades of dormancy, the area has now been transformed into a cultural centre thanks to the new owner. However, this is only temporary and will be replaced by a hotel after reconstruction. For a connoisseur of the local developers’ relationship to monuments, this sounds scary, but the person who knows the most about the monastery still hopes that perhaps a small miracle could happen in Smíchov.
Escape from Bismarck and Masaryk
At least, that is how Monica Bubna-Litic describes the current events when she unlocks the Church of the Annunciation, which stands at the head of the former monastery, with a massive key for a journalistic visit. “When I came here thirty-three years ago, there was basically nothing here except for the pews and one grate,” she recalls of the time when she began to attend Václav Malý’s Sunday sermons. For the pastor, famous for moderating demonstrations during the Velvet Revolution, the church was the first opportunity to officially exercise spiritual administration after the fall of the regime.
The petite woman walking through the temple was then still called Monica Sheba. Malý attracted her not only with his interpretation of the Christian faith, but also with his analysis of the art with which the church was decorated. It was then that she first heard the term “Beuron School” – a term used to describe the inimitable artistic style of the turn of the 19. and the 20th century, bringing together something as seemingly disparate as the teachings of the Catholic Church and ancient Egyptian art. Monica, who after the Revolution returned to her family name of Bubna-Litic, was so captivated by the story of an artistic era that she decided to devote the following decades of her life to it.
Today, he chairs the Society of Friends of Beuron Art and, as part of the activities of the affiliated Malakim Foundation, he regularly guides tours of the grounds of the former Smíchov monastery on weekends (the dates of the tours can be found on the Foundation’s website). Only in time did she discover that her passion for Beuronese art could have deeper roots. The Bubna-Litic family, or Bubna of Litice, which owns the Doudleby Chateau in the Orlické Mountains, is related by blood to the Swéerts-Sporck family. And it was the Countess Gabrielle Swéerts-Sporck who, at the end of the 19th century, was the first to do so. century paid for the construction of the Smíchov monastery, which is still named after its patron saint.
But we have to go even deeper to get to the heart of this remarkable story. Until 1873, when the brothers and Benedictine monks Maurus and Placidus Wolter founded the Beuron congregation in Beuron in the southwestern part of Germany. A peculiar offshoot of the Benedictine order that decided to spread the Christian faith through a completely new artistic style. To this end, the Beuron Art School was established, where members of the Order learned to paint, sculpt and create in the spirit of the new principles.
Their author was Peter Lenz, who took the monastic name Desiderius. At a time when European art (including religious art) was dominated by academic realism, with images that tried to be more real than reality, Lenz wanted to return to the spiritual, timeless roots of civilization, where the form of art would not distract the viewer from the content. And he found them in ancient Egypt, even though he had never been to Africa and had only studied the ancient engravings and paintings in photographs and drawings. The result was the Beuronese “canon”, in which the ideal representation of the male and female body follows a precise geometric construction with equilateral triangles, circles and squares inscribed into the figure.
Cells used for meditation and sleep were partitioned with plasterboard partitions.
Political developments in Europe then decided that the fame of this art did not spread from Germany, but from the Czech lands. Shortly after the founding of the Beuron Congregation, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck launched the “Kulturkampf”, a cultural struggle against the Catholic Church. In an effort to limit the Vatican’s influence on the unified German state, he began to abolish monasteries. The Beuron community therefore moved first to Austria and from there to Bohemia in 1880. Specifically to Prague, where it first took over the Emmaus Monastery.
Eight years later, on the other side of the Vltava, the religious brothers started an arcidillo in Smíchov, which they dedicated to the sisters who helped them. The construction of the monastery of St. Gabriel with a church in the Neo-Romanesque architectural style, the four-year construction of which was financed by the aforementioned Countess Swéerts-Sporck. The decoration of the site continued long after its completion. Before everything was finished, October 1918 came, Czechoslovakia was founded and the story of the escape was repeated.
Masaryk’s republic also tried to get rid of the influence of Catholic Rome on the state. The predominantly German-speaking order sensed that it was no longer welcome here. The nuns therefore decided to leave for the still strongly Catholic Austria and in 1919 sold the premises to the Ministry of Posts and Telegraphs. The furnishings were taken away in dozens of freight wagons and they parted with the monastery with only one condition of sale, which fortunately remains valid to this day: the Church of the Annunciation must be kept by the postal officials for religious purposes.
The trail led to the Schwarzenbergs
The temple was never consecrated. While the monastery has undergone (often drastic) building modifications in the following decades, the church has been preserved in the form in which it was built more than a hundred years ago. Behind the altar, a painting painted by Desiderius Lenz on wooden panels with the Madonna as the Seat of Wisdom is still attached to the wall. Above it, a fresco of the reigning Christ by Lenz’s colleague Willibrord Verkade looks down from the vault of the apse, and the altarpiece is surrounded by monumental figures of angels created by the nuns under Lenz’s direction.
Lenz’s main work is on the opposite side. Over the wooden choir, where the organ now stands, he painted a pieta, the form of which is quite unusual: the dead Christ does not lie in the arms of his mother Mary, but on a stone table in front of her, partially wrapped in bandages. Rather than the events just before the resurrection, the scene is more reminiscent of the embalming of the pharaohs. The impression is confirmed by a huge wooden falcon, a traditional attribute of the ancient Egyptian sky god Horus, which sits in front of the altar on top of the lectern from which the Bible is read from. Nowhere in the world today will we see anything like it. Other Beuron churches (the artistic style disappeared after Lenz’s death in 1928) have not survived in such integrity.
A few years ago, we would have searched for a falcon in Smíchov in vain. Together with other furnishings, it disappeared in Austria in 1919 and has recently returned to Prague thanks to the research of Monika Bubna-Litic. First, she went in search of the church and monastery furnishings to the Benedictine archives in Graz. Her footsteps subsequently led her to St Gabriel’s Monastery at Bertholdstein Castle on the Austrian border with Slovenia and Hungary. It was here that the nuns took refuge from Prague in 1919 at the invitation of the Schwarzenberg family. A member of the Smíchov community was Benedikta of Schwarzenberg, who later became abbess of a new monastery in Austria. And as it turned out, the chairs, tables, armchairs and other furnishings have been well cared for by her sisters to this day.
Monica Bubna-Litic used period photographs to identify what was originally created for Prague’s Smíchov. And when the sisters moved to the new convent in St. Johann near Herberstein in 2008, the members of the increasingly thinning community decided to return the long-unused items to their original location. Monica Bubna-Litic is currently negotiating with the order about the possibility of returning to Prague the zinc statue of the Archangel Gabriel, which used to stand on the roof above the main entrance to the church; now there is a copy of it in the church.
The church was leaking and some of the frescoes are damaged because of this. Otherwise, however, the temple faithfully resembles its historical purpose except for the bricked-up choir. Including surviving quotations from the Bible written on the wall in Czech and German. The rest of the monastery is more complicated. The postmen had already rebuilt what they could in it during the First Republic. The central Garden of Eden, where the nuns grew herbs, was paved, roofed and the cheque office was placed there. Later it was turned into a museum, where postmen’s carriages were exhibited, and during the normalisation period a warehouse with shelves for folders was placed here.
The Memento of the Destroyed Disciples
The warehouse also became the monastery library with preserved wooden shelves and a still functional mobile ladder. The surrounding garden, in which the sisters grew grain for bread, which they distributed to the poor of Smíchov, has been walled off by officials and now it is impossible to walk from the premises to Petřín (a passage is planned as part of the upcoming reconstruction). St. Luke’s studio with its huge window, where Desiderius Lenz once taught the nuns to paint, overhangs the floor. The same thing happened to the fresco with the crucified Christ in front of the main staircase, of which only the upper part is visible. New layers of technical paints covered almost the entire monastery, which inspired Alfons Mucha’s Art Nouveau paintings and František Bílek’s ornamental writing. Cells used for meditation and sleep were covered with plasterboard partitions, linoleum was glued to the parquet floor.
The bizarre mix of historical layers during the walk through the grounds is enhanced by the current occupants of the monastery. In 2020 it was bought from Česká pošta for 353 million by the investment group CIMEX, which plans to turn it into a five-star hotel with 180 rooms. Of course, he promises to respect its cultural value as much as possible – after all, the monastery and church have been a cultural monument since 1964.
Before the reconstruction and renovation, CIMEX renamed the building Gabriel Loci and dedicated it to cultural activities. In the monastery’s cells, there are about twenty artists who have residences in the monastery. The popular Designblok has been held here three times, the Summer Stage is used for film screenings and theatre during the holidays, and the week before last the composer Karel Havlíček gave a piano concert and DJ set in the church. And films are also shot here. With Monica Bubna-Litic, after just a few steps, we find ourselves in a New York laundromat, which the filmmakers are currently building.
In addition to the filmmakers, the monastery is freshly occupied by restorers. Since July, students from the Faculty of Restoration at the University of Pardubice in Litomyšl have started to uncover the original paintings in the rooms using probes and to find out where the Beuron frescoes have survived.
CIMEX Group’s plans are not yet public. However, according to the director of its development, Jiří Bartoš, they are based on the fact that the monastery was originally designed and also used for accommodation, so now only its clientele will change: “The reconstruction into a hotel will require minimal intervention and will preserve valuable elements of the listed building.”
Monica Bubna-Litic is counting on just that. During the journey through the vast corridors, whose shabby state makes it obvious that the minimal interventions will not be the end of it, there is a genuine excitement of discovering the expected treasures that the unique complex still hides. It began with a basic survey of the walls, under which the frescoes should be hidden, the form of which, for example, in the huge dining room, we know today only from hundred-year-old photographs.
“We would like to preserve the frescoes in the Garden of Eden so that visitors can admire them, and we are also planning to reconstruct the Church of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary,” adds Bartoš on behalf of the developer. It is difficult to estimate how long the work will take, he said, and it is equally difficult to quantify the investment. It depends not only on what is discovered during the survey, but also on the cost of materials and labour.
How the interiors of the monastery turned into a hotel will look like is now being debated within the company, and the conservationists will of course have their say as well. A symbol of prudence may be the fresco located near the former abbess’s bedroom. It depicts three Emausian disciples. However, their faces with haloes were cut up years ago by the workers during the drawing of electricity and replaced with mortar above the inscription “Mane nobiscum Domine” (or “Lord, stay with us”).
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