Kde kdysi stával mariánský sloup
Where the Marian Column Once Stood

Summary/Abstract: The reverence felt for the V. Mary in Catholic Europe grew stronger for centuries and gradually became an inseparable part of the life of Catholics in Europe. One of the major peaks in this relationship in the Czech and European history were the 17th and 18th centuries. Artistic expression became a specific form of experiencing it. And this emotional reverberation is to be found in the origin and realization of the monument designed in 1652 by an outstanding Prague sculptor, Jan Jiří Bendl, as an expression of gratitude of Prague people to the V. Mary for her intercession, resulting in the saving of Prague from the attacks of the Swedish troops at the end of the Thirty Years’ War and in the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalen. The Marian Column in the Old Town became one of the most significant objects of religious practice not only for its contemporaries but also for the subsequent 250 years. In addition to this, it managed to raise many other religious and artistic sentiments, through which it entered literature. When an independent Czechoslovak republic came into being, the Marian Column in the Old Town, however, became a victim of the surge of period of iconoclasm and false interpretation, which presented the Column as a work with which the ruling Habsburg dynasty mocked the defeated Czech nation after the historic defeat of the troops of the rebellious Czech estates by Habsburg arms in the Battle of the White Mountain (near Prague), on 8 November 1620. The destruction itself of the Marian Column entered the literature of Catholic poets and even infl uenced some of them (Jaroslav Durych) in their political attitudes to the republic.

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