Strahov Monastery Library

Museum · Strahov (Hradčany)Prague, Czechia

Strahov has been a Premonstratensian monastery since 1143, and its library is two rooms built more than a century apart. The Theological Hall of the early 1670s is low and white, a barrel vault of curling stucco with astronomical globes standing between the shelves and a wooden wheel that let a reader keep several books open at once. The Philosophical Hall, finished in the 1790s, is the opposite: walnut cases two storeys high, brought in from a monastery that had been shut down, under a ceiling fresco Franz Anton Maulbertsch painted at seventy in about six months. The two halls hold some 60,000 volumes between them; the library as a whole runs to roughly 200,000, with its manuscripts and incunabula kept apart in a treasury. Visitors do not walk in — both rooms are roped at the doorway, so the whole visit is two views straight down an aisle at painted sky, marbled columns and shelves receding into warm brown. The corridor connecting them is a cabinet of curiosities: narwhal tusks, dried sea creatures, whale jaws, assembled when natural history and wonder were the same subject.

Worth knowing

Good to know

You look in, you do not walk in — both halls are roped at the door, so bring something that magnifies if you want to read the ceilings or the spines at the far end.
Mid-morning is when the halls read — the windows are high and side-on, and by afternoon the far end of the Philosophical Hall has fallen into shadow.
The halls are seen from two doorways — the whole visit to the libraries themselves is two views straight down an aisle, so what you can examine at arm's length is the passage between them.
The terrace outside is the reward — the monastery's own brewery and the wall beside it look straight down the hill over the whole red-roofed city, and most people leave without seeing it.

Things to do

1
Stand in both doorways
Do the Theological Hall first: low, white, cluttered with globes and stucco. Then the Philosophical, which is twice as tall and lined with dark walnut instead of white plaster. Taken in that order, the second room hits far harder than it would on its own.
2
Walk out to the terrace
Past the library the monastery grounds open onto a wall above the vineyard. The whole city is below you: the castle to the left, the river, the Old Town spires, and Petřín's tower just along the same ridge. Most people arrive for the books and leave without coming out here.
3
Get close to the cabinet in the passage
The collection between the halls was bought from a private estate in 1798, and the strangest things in it are frauds: sailors slit sharks and rays open, splayed them flat, dried them into wings and horns and sold them at home as sea monsters. Two of them are on the wall. It is also the only stretch of the visit where you stand on the same side of the rope as the objects.