St. Nicholas Church

This guide to St. Nicholas Church in Prague follows a Baroque hall Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer built for Benedictine monks in the seventeen thirties, on the site of an older church seized after the Battle of White Mountain. You'll hear how Emperor Joseph the Second shut the monastery in seventeen eighty-one, and how the emptied church spent decades as a granary, an archive, and a garrison before Russian Orthodox worshippers moved in and a tsar reportedly sent the chandelier still hanging inside. It ends by naming the reformer Jan Hus, once burned as a heretic, and the movement that eventually claimed this building for itself.