Strahov Library

Strahov’s library is known by two rooms, and each belongs to a different century. The Theological Hall was finished in 1679 under Abbot Jeroným Hirnheim, himself a philosopher and theologian. A hundred years later Abbot Václav Mayer, elected in 1779, added the Philosophical Hall in the newer Classical style. It was the last major building project at the monastery. Later abbots kept to repairs.

The halls belong to a Premonstratensian abbey founded in Prague in 1143, and its books have been lost more than once. In 1420, at the start of the Hussite period, citizens of Prague attacked the monastery and burned its books with the furnishings of church and convent. The house took a long time to recover. Towards the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Swedish troops looted the church and the library. Each time, the abbey rebuilt.

The twentieth century took the monastery away from its community. In 1950 the communist regime seized it, interned the canons and turned the site into the Memorial of National Literature, which absorbed the library. After 1989 the Premonstratensians got it back, and by 1994 the library had been renewed along with the church and a new picture gallery.

Today the collection runs to more than 200,000 volumes. Over 3,000 manuscripts and 1,500 first prints are kept in a separate depository, and a reading room is open. The ceilings carry frescoes by Siard Nosecký and Anton Maulbertsch. For a monastic hall of the same ambition, compare Admont Abbey Library in Austria, completed about a century after the Theological Hall.