Baroque for beginners

One of the best tools travellers can take along on a trip is an informed vocabulary for the places they'll be visiting, and three of the best words to keep in mind for any historic European city are Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque. For most people these terms will crop up in connection with architecture; a Gothic bridge here, a Renaissance chateau there and Baroque scrolls and cherubs just about everywhere.

The big advantage of knowing the terms and understanding what they mean is that they transform a city from just a bunch of old buildings to a place with a story. A traveller who can recognise and interpret architectural styles will be able to tell how old a city is, in which periods it flourished or stagnated, which parts were home to the rich, the poor, the Jews or the Gypsies and be able to find the signs of past fires, floods and war damage.

This post will attempt a brief layman's overview of Baroque architecture as it appears in the Czech Republic. If I can think of clever names, posts about Renaissance, Gothic, Romanesque and Secession architecture might follow.

At the time the Baroque style was first developing in Italy, the Czech lands were embroiled in a religious war that lasted the three decades from 1618 to 1648. When the Thirty Years War ended, much of the post-war rebuilding was in the Baroque style favoured by the victorious Roman Catholics.

The Catholics hoped the new Baroque style would communicate religious themes to illiterate citizens by expressing dynamic movement and dramatic tension in a emotionally powerful way. Great European Baroque painters included Caravaggio and Rembrandt and the best known sculptures are those of Bernini and Michelangelo. The greatest architects to work in the Czech lands during the Baroque period were the Krystof and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer, who were responsible for Prague's St Nicholas' and Loreta churches, the Břevnov monastery and the Church of St Mary Magdalene in Karlovy Vary

In contrast to the austerity of earlier Gothic cathedrals, Baroque church interiors are richly and majestically decorated. Elaborate murals, ornate sculpture, gilding and other opulent surface decoration and embellishment are telltale signs that an interior dates from the Baroque era. Later Baroque churches might have elliptical or complex floor plans and the saints, cherubs and angels will be twisting, turning or writhing as the sculptor expresses the drama of the moment he's captured them in.

Outdoors, giveaways that a particular building is in the Baroque style include roof domes and cupolas, pear-shaped spires, mirrored pairs of asymmetric scrolls, elaborately sculpted stone door surrounds, and elliptical or complex geometrical window openings. If you can spot three or more of these features on any historic building it's a safe bet that it dates from the Baroque period, which in Central Europe lasted approximately from 1650 to 1800.

The purest examples of Baroque architecture in the Czech lands are the UNESCO listed archbishops' palace and gardens at Kroměříž, country chateaux like those at Kuks, Chlumec nad Cidlinou and Buchlovice, churches like St Nicholas' in Prague and the UNESCO listed Trinity Column and the series of six baroque fountains in Olomouc.

Related post: Top Ten of Czech Architecture

Where and what was the Sudetenland?

The Sudetenland was a collective name for the regions of the Czech lands that had a majority German population when Czechoslovakia was formed in 1918.

The Sudetenland mostly consisted of Czech border regions, where German settlers and their descendants had lived since the 1300’s when they were invited by King Přemysl Otakar II to farm, mine and guard the wild mountainous edges of his kingdom.

The German settlers and their descendants flourished while dynasties of Bohemian kings came and went. In the 1600’s the Czech lands were absorbed into Austria and ruled by Habspurg emperors from Vienna. Under the Austrians, German was the language of government, education and culture, and Czech was gradually reduced to a spoken rural argot, in danger of dying out altogether until its revival in the 19th century.

At the end of World War One, when defeated Austria was carved into several countries (according to the principles of self determination) Germans and Czechs within the newly created Czechoslovakia found their roles suddenly reversed. The Germans became an ethnic minority and the Czechs were suddenly the power-wielding, law-making majority.

Many of the ethnic Germans were displeased with their new situation, and felt discriminated against. Through the 1920s and the difficult years of the Great Depression the idea of seceding from Czechoslovakia and joining neighbouring Germany and Austria became increasingly popular among Sudeten Germans and their political leaders.

Once Austria had been annexed to Germany in 1938, German leader Adolf Hitler began to enthusiastically support and encourage Sudeten German ideas of joining his Third Reich to escape perceived oppression by the ruling Czech majority. Support turned to demands; armed uprisings and invasions threatened, and in 1938 a meeting was called between Western European leaders to discuss “the Sudeten Question”.

In Munich, the leaders of England and France agreed that they would offer no military opposition to the Sudeten regions seceding and joining Germany. If Czechoslovakia wanted to resist Sudeten secession and German expansion, it would have to do so alone, despite a current military alliance with France.

In October 1938, the Sudetenland was annexed by Hitler’s Germany and the British and French leaders returned home as triumphant peacemakers. No Czechoslovak representative was invited to the meeting and not surprisingly it’s usually referred to by Czechs as the Munich Betrayal.

Hitler had promised at Munich that once the Sudeten question was solved, he had no further territorial ambitions in Europe. Six months later his troops occupied the remainder of Czechoslovakia, and six months after that they marched into Poland and World War Two began.



In 1945, with the Czech lands liberated by Soviet forces from the east and Allied forces from the west, the Potsdam conference decreed that the German population of Czechoslovakia would be transferred to Germany or Austria, leaving the Czech lands to be occupied almost solely by Czechs.

This population transfer (or expulsion, depending on translation of the Czech word “Odsun”) remains a highly controversial subject and influences Czech-German political relations even to the present time. Its direct effect on the Sudeten regions was to leave them notably underpopulated, with many towns and villages completely deserted.

After the expulsion, the Sudeten areas were resettled by Czechoslovak citizens of other ethnicities, Czechs, Moravians, Slovaks, Gypsies (Roma), and Ruthenians (from the far eastern tip of Czechoslovakia that was ceded to the Soviet Union). Many villages and areas were never properly resettled and fell quickly into neglect, especially along the southern and western borders where the ‘Iron Curtain’ was descending. Away from prosperous tourist magnets like Český Krumlov and Karlovy Vary, attentive travellers will sense a difference between the former Sudeten regions and the rest of the country even today.

One last thing about the words Sudeten and Sudetenland, is to be careful using them, especially around anybody who might be old enough to remember the brutal Nazi occupation. In 1942, Czechoslovak president-in-exile Beneš wrote “the words Sudeten, Sudetenland and Sudete will forever in our Czech lands be connected with Nazi brutality toward we Czechs and toward democratic Germans before and after the fateful crisis of 1938”.

When in doubt, use “former” as a preface, or follow the example of Brigadier General George Taylor; signing a surrender agreement he crossed out the “Elbogen, Sudetenland” of his German counterpart, noted “does not exist” and replaced it with the town's pre-war name “Loket, Czechoslovakia” avoiding the S-word altogether.

Related posts:
Schindler’s Svitavy
All the famous Czechs were Germans
The Fateful Eights