Page:Guide to the Bohemian section and to the Kingdom of Bohemia - 1906.djvu/51

37 of Strahov with its fine two-spired church. Directly opposite the observer, there is the fine park belonging to the Lobkovic palace, adjoining it is the garden of the Priest’s Seminary and the park of the Counts of Schoenborn with a very nice glorietto, farther on, the tree tops of the smaller garden of the Counts Wratislaw and that of the now extinct Counts Vrbny. High above all this beauty under the very ridge of the mountain, rising above the spires and turrets, roofs and chimneys of a great mass of buildings, we see the richest monastery of Bohemia, the Mount Sion, the old renowned Strahov towards which we now wend our steps.

Passing St. Elisabeth’s Hospital (from 1664) with picturesque stairs ornamented by a cross and the statues of the Virgin Mary and St. John the Evangelist, we reach the extensive monastery which was founded in 1140 by king Wladislaus, and called even then Mount Sion. In the Hussite war it was broken down, and rebuilt in the XVIIth century along with the adjoining three-aisled church of the Virgin Mary which contains the largest organ in Bohemia and valuable pictures by Bohemian painters. The greatest ornament of the monastery is its splendid picture-gallery containing in addition to works by Bohemian painters, Duerer’s well known Rosary-feast, and paintings by Lucas Cranach, Carlo Dolce, Holbein, Quido Reni and others, kept in a suite of splendid baroque halls which equal in beauty the library hall of the university. The library of the monastery contains a great number of most valuable manuscripts, amongst them some with specimens of old Bohemian miniature-painting of the XIth. century, manuscipts of Tycho Brahe, incunabula by Melantrich and others From the monastery, we pass by the half-gothic church of St. Rochus (dating from the beginning of the XVIIth century) to the Pohořelec, an open space of quite a small-town character, surrounded by small houses, some shingle-roofed and looking at them we can imagine ourselves beyond Prague in a little country-borough.

Quite different is the aspect of the adjacent Loretto-square, where the eye meets the gigantic palace of the Counts Černín with a façade ornamented by Corinthian pillars and with five porches, a splendid work of Francesco