Podlažický klášter Monastery

Podlažice are nowadays a local part of Chrasti u Chrudimi. In the twelfth century, a Benedictine monastery was founded here, which survived until the spring of fourteen twenty-one. At that time it was destroyed by Hussite forces during their campaign into eastern Bohemia and was never rebuilt.

The monastery is first mentioned in the year eleven fifty-nine in connection with a nobleman Vrbata, who had it built. However, construction probably began already before eleven fifty. The monastery's necrology names Vrbata of Kostelce as the founder and donor. The monks were apparently sent here by the abbot of the monastery in Opatovice nad Labem. The first abbot was Hugo, known as a witness in a charter from eleven sixty.

Podlažice was apparently founded as a double monastery in the spirit of the Hirsau reform. In such monasteries, monks and nuns lived side by side, in separate areas with minimal contact. They were typical of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and from the middle of the twelfth century they gradually disappeared. They appear rarely in sources. Most reliably they are revealed precisely in necrologies, where the nuns are designated by special terms, among others by the word soror, meaning sister.

Around thirteen fifty, twenty monks lived in the monastery. Even in fourteen forty-eight, long after the monastery's destruction, the Pope appointed a new abbot following the death of abbot Jan, apparently only a titular abbot Boniface of Volkenštejn.

The monastery's most famous work is the Codex gigas, written and illuminated in its scriptorium. It ranks among the world's largest manuscript books and attempted to summarize all knowledge of that time. Because of the full-page depiction of the devil, it is also called the Devil's Bible. From the monastery also comes a tin baptismal font from fourteen oh six, which today serves in the cathedral of the Holy Ghost in Hradec Králové.

The core of the Chrastek estate, which once belonged to the monastery, became in the seventeenth century the foundation of the property of the Hradec Králové diocese. The third bishop of Hradec, Jan František Kryštof of Talmberg, had a Baroque church of Saint Margaret of Antioch built on the site of the original church. Construction lasted from sixteen ninety-six to seventeen twenty-one and the bishop was buried in it in sixteen ninety-eight. The original three-aisled monastery church was almost half as long again.

Archaeologists worked here already in eighteen thirty-four and in the years nineteen oh eight to nineteen oh nine. During the excavation by Jan Frolík in two thousand four, about sixty graves were found of men, women and children, two children's graves even in the paradise court. Why women and children were buried in a male monastery remains unclear. They could have been people from the village, donors of the monastery and their families, or burial here only began after the monastery's destruction in fourteen twenty-one. The finds are stored in the museum in Chrudimi. Further excavation took place in connection with filming the film Ďáblova lest.