Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady and St. John the Baptist

The Cathedral is open daily, except Sunday:
April - October 9 am - 5 pm
Admission 30,- CZK
Student 20,- CZK

Photo album

The height, width and length of a Cistercian cathedral corresponded to the needs and ambitions of the monastery to which it belonged. Therefore, the fact that the conventual church of Sedlec is one of the largest cathedral-type building in Bohemia, is eloquent enough. It was built between 1282/3 and 1320. The exterior of the church, even after subsequent adaptations, attests to the Cistercians' original project. Nothing is known today about the earliest furnishings of its interior. The strictness of Cistercian observance must have been reflected in its interior whose structure and walls repeated the exterior pattern of smoothly finished and precisely fitting unplastered sandstone blocks. Perfect proportionality, regular music-inspired rhythm correlating the individual architectural links, and light pouring in through tall windows, were the components at play in creating the pure beauty of the Cistercian house of prayer. Unlike urban churches, this temple was not meant to dazzle the congregation by the splendour of colours and shapes, to epitomize authority and wealth. It was an unpretentious, functional building, erected by the hands of the friars. It served for contemplative prayer and meditation. It worshipped God by the purity and perfection of its form.

After the church was set on fire and pillaged in 1421, all that remained were its outer walls. The interior furnishings perished. Subsequently, from 1554, it received repeated provisional repairs. A truly substantial renovation, however, was initiated only under Abbot Jindřich Snopek, from 1700 - 1706. The abbot first invited master-builder Paul Ignaz Bayer (1656 – 1733) who stabilized the statics of the dilapidated church. Soon thereafter, though, Snopek met Giovanni Santini Aichl, a most original architect in whom he found a like-minded collaborator on a project for the complete overhaul of the monastic precincts, including most notably the conventual church. Santini respected its original five-stage disposition of a cathedral basilica with three-stage transept. He created new vaults, and attached to the existing structure a symmetrical south aisle which replaced a gallery of the derelict former cloisters. He added a new west front which he completed by a porch with a tower-shaped extension into whose niches he installed Jäckel's statues of the church's co-patron St. John the Baptist and of the order's patrons, St. Bernard and St. Robert, surmounting them at the apex by the Assumption of Our Lady. In contrast to the church's exterior, which remained essentially unchanged from what it had looked like at the time of its origin, the interior was altered, notably owing to the use of plaster on its walls, combined with the application of decorative stucco-work in the Gothicizing Baroque style. The light pouring in through tall windows, which was previously absorbed by the grey structure of the sandstone blocks, has since Santini's time rebounded from whitewashed walls to generate the impression of a bright thoroughly lit space. Thanks to this light effect the church interior has an extraordinary atmosphere of a divinely illuminated ambience even on murky days. There, Santini succeeded in still enhancing the cornerstone of Cistercian architecture, by filling it with the new spirituality of Baroque light.

All of the conventual church's original furnishings perished in 1421, when it was burnt down and pillaged by the Hussites. From the second half of the 15^th century, when the church was at least partly restored, a wooden statue of Our Lady of Sedlec has survived at the rear of the transept side chapel. It must have replaced an earlier sculpture as the church's principal cult statue. In the early 18^th century it underwent substantial re-carving, was enlarged and received new polychrome paint, in consonance with the new concept of the church's Baroque furnishings. It was then installed at the rear of the double chapel in the south section of the transept. The chapel was dedicated to Our Lady of Sedlec, and by the mid-18^th century its illusive columned architecture was enhanced by Supper's wall paintings. It has a counterpart on the north side in a chapel dedicated to the patrons of the renewed monastery, The Fourteen Intercessors, also decorated by Supper. Only these two chapels, plus the chapels on the chancel gallery, with exquisite altars featuring carvings by Jäckel and Brandl's paintings of St. Luitgard, St. Juliana, and Assembly of Bohemia's Patrons, have survived from the conventual church's original Baroque decoration. The high altar was disassembled and sold after the dissolution of the monastery in 1784, as were other furnishings. After the closure of the Church of SS. Philip and James in 1806, the remaining items from the monastery's two churches were deposited in the former conventual church. However, they no longer formed the kind of systematic, conceptually compact pattern of liturgical decoration that was typical for Baroque churches, even though the collection does include a number of fine works, including Willmann's paintings of St. Wenceslas, Martyrdom of SS. Philip and James, and Hussites Burning Down the Monastery in 1421.

From the mid-19^th century the Sedlec church was continuously repaired and extended. In the 1880s it received a Neo-Gothic high altar of Our Lady flanked by Bohemia's patrons, made after the design of Ludvík Lábler, which, however, is disproportionate to the dimensions of the church interior: it is overshadowed by large altars of St. Bernard and St. Benedict, originally from the Church of SS. Philip and James.