synagoga v Hořicích Synagogue

Welcome to Horice. Right now, you are standing in front of a former Jewish synagogue, located in the Tovární street north of Jiří z Poděbrad, in places where the Jewish ghetto was in the past. When you look around and look at the building in front of you, you see the calm and somewhat hidden atmosphere of this place, which remembers centuries of human destinies, prayers and moved history.

Let's go back in time to when the older wooden prayer room used to stand here instead of building today. The life of the local community has gradually developed, so it was necessary to ensure a more dignified and safer booth. The result was a solid brick Baroque building, which grew in seventeen hundred sixty-seven. Hořická synagogue thus replaced the original wooden structure and became the centre of the spiritual life of the local Jewish people.

Now pay attention to the architecture itself and the details you have right in front of you. You're standing in front of a Baroque ground-floor building whose face has been transformed over the centuries. The building has undergone several building modifications, the most significant of which was the New Romanesque reconstruction. When you look closely at the exterior, notice that the entrance to the interior leads down the stairs deep below the street surface, which gives the whole place a very unusual and distinctive character. And if you look up to the north side of the roof, you'll see a unique detail that resisted the time test, and you'll see the original ten-year-old, under which the memorial board is located.

But the history of this place has not always been peaceful. In 185,559, the building was hit by a serious test when the city went through a devastating fire that spread through the street with mass crabs. The flames did not spare the synagogue and damaged it badly. But the resilience of the local people was reflected in the fact that the monument was soon repaired and remodeled in a new Romanesque way, thereby gaining the form you are looking at today. The building served for regular services until the mid-1930s.

When communities were changing, and history was bringing about more twists, the building didn't disappear, but it found new applications. In nineteen hundred and fifty-six she began to serve as a prayer house of the Czechoslovak Church of Hussite, which closed one chapter and opened another one which kept this space alive. A few decades later, in nineteen hundred ninety-three, the object was well declared a protected cultural monument of the Czech Republic, confirming its lasting value for the whole society.

Stay still for a while in this place, inhale the atmosphere of old Horice and let the silence that radiates the synagogue on you. Thank you for your attention, I hope you enjoyed the tour, and I wish you a wonderful rest of your stay in our city. Goodbye.