Mariánská kaple ve Znojmě Chapel

The Marian Chapel in Znojmo no longer stands. It was located on Mariánské náměstí, which received its name from the chapel, and its story lasted one hundred and thirty years.

On its site, there first stood a stone column depicting the Virgin Mary from the year seventeen hundred and thirty. A local master baker named Waigart donated it as thanks for recovery from a serious illness. At the same time, he paid for a lamp to be lit there three times a week.

The column stood on a vineyard. When the married couple Ulrich and Barbara Scharfnitzlovi purchased it on the fourth of May, eighteen eighteen, from the Roder family from Nový Šaldorf, they took on the responsibility of caring for the statue and the lamp. So they would not have to constantly repair the statue, they requested permission from the magistrate in November eighteen twenty-one to build a small chapel with a domed roof and a roof lantern over it. The magistrate agreed in February eighteen twenty-two.

The higher district office, however, determined that it was a new chapel, and for that, the approval of the bishop's consistory was needed. The magistrate was therefore sharply reprimanded for unauthorized permission. The consistory approved the construction retroactively on the seventeenth of May, eighteen twenty-two, when the chapel by the district architect Joseph Dämische was already nearly finished. However, it attached a condition. During the evening prayer, which took place there on weekdays after the Feast of the Visitation of Mary, no more than four candles were permitted to be lit besides the Eternal Light. The chapel was consecrated in the evening of the thirteenth of July, eighteen twenty-two. In the year eighteen forty, a painting of the Virgin Mary by Anton Ferenz was added to it.

In the year eighteen seventy-one, Agnes Adámková sold the land with the chapel to the city. However, the chapel was not mentioned in the purchase contract. Her husband Jakob Adámek continued to light the lamp in it and collected donations from the collection box. In eighteen ninety-five, he then demanded compensation from the city. The city granted it to him, and it was only then that the chapel became city property.

During renovations of the square in nineteen twenty-three, a monument to those who fell in the First World War was created there. The city wanted to move the chapel about one hundred meters, but the Second World War prevented it. In nineteen forty-nine, the idea of moving it returned, but again it was not carried out. The square, meanwhile, had been renamed Stalingradské náměstí, and the communist authorities planned a monument to the Red Army there. The chapel was in their way. It was closed and in June nineteen fifty-two it was demolished by members of the people's militia. The painting of the Virgin Mary was transferred to the Church of Saint Nicholas.

In recent years, the idea of rebuilding the chapel has arisen, but so far it has not been possible to accomplish it. A memorial plaque on a nearby building commemorates the lost structure. Its floor plan is marked by indentations in the surface of the roadway.