kostel Narození Panny Marie (Holubice) Church

On the edge of the village Holubice near Prague is the Church of the Birth of the Virgin Mary, which is one of the most valuable estates of our medieval architectural village. Protected as a cultural monument of the Czech Republic, it represents a remarkable sequence of construction stages that transformed it from a simple Romanesque rotunda to a church with Gothic elements and baroque adaptations.

The church was founded between 1224 and 1226 as a Romanesque rotunda with a single apside. The exact dating of this building is justified - we can prove its foundation according to the seal of Bishop Pelhrim from 1224-1225, which was preserved in the altar. After the mid-13th century, the building was extended to a second apside, thereby gaining its characteristic two-apside form. In the second half of the 14th century, namely in the 1940s, the prism tower of the Gothic style was added. The upper part of the tower and stairwell was rebuilt in the subsequent Baroque adjustments; This, however, was overthrown during the general reconstruction between 1955 and 1957. At the same time as the Baroque, a rectangular sacristy joined.

The core of the church consists of a Romanesque rotunda built from a swirling block, decorated with cylindrical lantern and two semi-circular apsids. The windows are Romanesque; in the oldest, eastern apsid they are separated by presses and equipped with Gothic circles. The ship reaches a diameter of less than six meters, the walls are over a metre thick and 15 centimeters thick. The gothic prism tower with a needle roof on crackers is one storey with barefoot corners. The tower and the lantern are covered with metal, and the other roofs are covered with paint. Around the church is the area of the former cemetery, which fences the wall of protection, in whose corner is a statue of St. John Nepomucký, dating back to 1854.

But the most impressive are the wall paintings uncovered in the 1950s. On three walls on the ground floor of the tower and the apsid preserved early Gothic painting decoration from the first half of the 14th century. Among the preserved themes are the scenes of the House of St. Catherine and the Stone of St. Stephen, supplemented by figures of saints: St. Jerome, Augustine, Madonna, St. Catherine, Virgin Mary with St. Vojtěd, St. Kliment and others. Other fragments have been discovered in the windows of the East Apside. The heraldic characters identified here refer to the Archbishop Arnošt of Pardubice and Tamma Plough of Rabštejn in Prague - at their time, the church and the village belonged to the goods of the saint chapter.

The visitor thus finds an extremely compact monument in the Holubice, in which traces of four centuries of sacral construction and art are hidden.