Bazilika Panny Marie Bolestné Basilica

Bazilika Panny Marie Bolestné is located right in the center of Bohosudova in the square, where it forms an architectural whole with ambition and former Jesuit residence. It is one of the main North Bohemian pilgrimage churches, whose historical importance reached its peak in the early 20th century, when it was the second most visited pilgrimage site of the lithomeric diocese in 1911 and the fifth in the whole of Bohemia. Right before the Basilica in Filip in 1885, it even served as the most visited Marian shrine in northern Bohemia.

Today's construction was started in 1701 by builder Giulio and Octavius Broggie and was completed in 1708 when both towers were built in the western front. However, the construction was preceded by a rich история. The original small, probably wooden chapel was built here in 1426, expanded in 1507, but it was abandoned before 1620. The construction was subsequently rebuilt in 1621-1624, which preceded today's ambitious Baroque.

The core of the venering is a legend written in wall paintings from the years 1701- 1706 in the cross corridor of basilica. According to tradition, the legend emerges from the Hussite era, when the nun from the convent of the sisters of the Svěce near Bílina, who lived here since 1227, fled the Hussite raid. They took their most precious reliquary - a little Gothic statue of the Painful Virgin Mary. The beet trees were hidden in the woods in the places of the current Bohosudova and the last of them, before death, hid the statue in an excavated old linden. On the Day of the Birth of the Virgin Mary in 1425 there was supposed to be a girl from Krupa eating grass. Legend has it that she was attacked by a poisonous snake that wrapped around her hand, but instead of attacking her, she turned against the linden, hissed heavily and then paralyzed. The locals, to whom the girl told her strange experience, found the statue in the linden. When the statue from the Krupsky church, where they carried it, returned to the linden a few times, God's will was seen and the first chapel was built here. The water in the nearby well was already considered to be medicinal.

The Gothic statue itself, which was allegedly the centre of the cult, measures approximately 15 centimetres and is made of burnt clay. It depicts the seated Virgin Mary, holding her to the lap of the dead Christ and looking at him painfully.

Basilica has been protected as a cultural monument since 1964 and was declared a national cultural monument of the Czech Republic in 2018. The pilgrimage to this place is still alive in the 21st century - for example, about 500 Lusatian Serbs from the neighbouring German Lusatia come to a joint meeting every year. Visiting Basilica thus represents a meeting of over 500 years of human godliness and Marian tradition.