Services resume in Emauzy Church after 60 years of silence
Easter Monday saw the reopening - after 60 years - of the Emauzy Church, located in the Podskali district of Prague 2. The Catholic Church - with its distinctive twin spires - had been closed since the Second World War, when it was badly damaged in an American bombing raid. Rob Cameron reports.
Dozens of worshippers and curious passers-by filed into Prague's Emauzy church on Monday, to attend the first mass there for sixty years. Hungarian bishop Asztrik Varszegi conducted the traditional Easter Monday service, accompanied by choral music.
The Emauzy Church - named after the biblical town of Emmaus - is part of a larger Benedictine monastery complex founded in the 14th century by Charles IV. Today the church and the monastery is simply known as "Emauzy", and the landmark - clearly visible from many parts of Prague - is dear to the hearts of many of the city's residents.
Regular services were held in the church until 1941, when the Nazis gave the building to the German Red Cross. Towards the end of the war Emauzy was badly damaged in a U.S. air raid, and repair work didn't begin until the late 1960s, when the distinctive twin spires were added. Karel Novotny, who remembers the bombing, was among those attending Monday's service.
"I was just five years old at the time, but I remember helping to clear the rubble after the bombing raid. The Benedictine Order was still here in the 1950s - I remember coming to services here in a makeshift chapel with my parents, and I remember the monks singing chorales... Emauzy was later taken over by the Academy of Sciences, and the Communist authorities started repairing it. But although they built those twin spires that you see today, inside the church itself was still a ruin."
In 1990 the Emauzy Monastery was given back to its original owners - the Benedictine monks who, faced with Communist persecution, had fled to Italy, where they founded a congregation in exile. Repair work began soon afterwards, but it's taken sixty years for services to resume in this unique 14th church.
