Týn Church

The building of the parish Church of Our Lady before Týn (colloquially Týn Church) began at the middle of the 14^th century as a result of the effort of Old Town’s residents to keep up with the ambitious churches that Charles IV was building in the recently founded New Town. The church was built on the location of an older, early Gothic church in the neighbourhood of the so-called Týn, originally a fortified merchant yard, where foreign merchants who came to Prague had to store their goods and pay customs. The building was led by the workshop of Matthias of Arras and after that of Peter Parler. After the beginning of the Hussite wars in 1419, the incomplete but consecrated church was won by the Hussites and after the return of archbishop Jan Rokycana to Prague in 1448 it served as the main church of the Utraquist (Calixtinist) church. It was completed between 1457 and 1511, when the main nave vault and the western gable were built, and both towers were completed. After the Bohemian Revolt was quashed in 1621, the Catholic church regained control over it.

The church has the shape of a three-nave basilica with two grandiose, 80-metre-tall towers on its western side. A gold Baroque relief of Madonna with baby Jesus (originally, there was a chalice) is located in the middle of the richly ornamented Gothic gable. An exceptionally valuable sculptural piece is the Gothic relief with three scenes from the passion of Christ in the tympanum of the northern portal. The main nave originally had a 31-metre-tall Gothic rib vault, which was replaced by a lower Baroque one after the fire of 1679. Most of the church’s interior decorations, including the main altar with the painting Assumption of Mary, one of the master pieces of the painter Karel Škréta, are Baroque. What is left of the Gothic furniture includes primarily the tin baptismal font from 1414 (the oldest in Prague), the stone pulpit and the richly decorated baldachin by Matěj Rejsek. Other valuable artwork includes the sculptures of Calvary and the Týn Madonna, by Master of the Týn Calvary. There is a number of valuable tombstones in the church, the most famous of which is the Renaissance tombstone of the astronomer Tycho Brahe.