Strahov Library

This guide to the Strahov Library in Prague begins in 1950, when Czechoslovakia's new communist government forced the Premonstratensian monks from the monastery they had called home for centuries. It follows how the library survived under state control, from Abbot Jerome Hirnheim's seventeenth-century Theological Hall to the towering Philosophical Hall finished by painter Anton Maulbertsch. Look for the narwhal tusk lying in the corridor, once mistaken by generations for a unicorn's horn.