Sedlec Abbey

The Cathedral of the Assumption of Our Lady at Sedlec is one of the finest and most unusual buildings in the Czech Republic — a UNESCO World Heritage Site that almost nobody visits compared to the famous ossuary a hundred metres away. The exterior is striking: a long white nave with soaring buttresses and pointed Gothic profiles, but built in the early 18th century with all the sophistication of mature Baroque spatial design.

Inside, the nave is luminous and surprisingly serene, the white plaster vaulting creating a quality of light very different from medieval Gothic stone. The way Santini-Aichel resolved the tension between the two architectural vocabularies is genuinely impressive — Gothic structure translated into Baroque surface. The church has been carefully restored and is open to visitors. It takes perhaps 20 minutes to see properly, but the walk from the ossuary is trivial. Seeing both in sequence is much better than seeing either alone.

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A story
Sedlec was the first Cistercian monastery in Bohemia, founded in 1142. It was burned down during the Hussite wars in 1421, and when it was eventually rebuilt in the early 18th century, the architect Jan Santini-Aichel was given a remarkable brief: to reconstruct a Gothic building in Baroque style while preserving the Gothic spirit. His solution — Gothic-Baroque, a style he invented virtually alone — produced a church of extraordinary refinement, where pointed arches and flying buttresses are rendered in white plaster with a lightness that seems to deny their own weight.

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