The wedding took place 700 years ago. To mark the anniversary, an exhibition entitled the Royal Wedding has been prepared. It will be held in the Stone Bell House and in the National Museum’s Lapidary on the Exhibition Grounds in Holešovice.
Besides Prague City Museum, Prague City Gallery and Prague City Archives, a number of institutions are involved in the project, including the National Museum,Italian-LuxembourgAssociation ofFriends and museums in Poland, Germany, Luxembourg, France and elsewhere.
Prelude in the Lapidary
Starting on 15th September, there will be a kind of a prelude to the exhibition, showing sculptures and stone works from the times of the last Premyslid Dynasty and the first Luxembourg rulers on the Czech throne. The exhibition will display over 130 exhibits of sculptures, stone works, seal casts, heraldic signs and 48 popular science cycle panels about the history of the imperial and royal rule of the Luxembourg Dynasty in Italy and in the Czech Lands.
Hidden temples on the map of Prague
Praguers will thus have the opportunity to see not only fragments of the temples of that time but also an attempt of their reconstruction, mostly concerning St Linhart’s Church, St. Valentine‘s Church, St. Ludmila’s Chapel of the Tyn Church. Church and Cyriac Monastery of the Holy Cross, St. Peter’s and St. Paul’s Church, St. Benedict’s Church with the commendam of the German Order, Zbraslav Moanstery and others.
The exhibition will be held from 15th September to 5th December. After that, from 6th February 2011, it will only be open to groups which have booked in advance due to bad climatic conditions in the Lapidary.
New issue of coins
The Czech National Bank issued silver coins of the nominal value of 200 CZK to commemorate the important wedding. An interesting thing is that in a realistic way, the coins depict the wedding between the Premyslid and the Luxembourg Dynasties. The Bank of Luxembourg also prepared coins of the value of 7 Euro to symbolize the anniversary. As this is a very unusual value of a coin, the bank had to obtain an approval from the European Commission, which gave its authorization with regards to the importance of such an European anniversary.
Exhibition in the heart of Prague
The exhibition itself will take place from 4th November to 6th February in the Stone Bell House, which is said to have been Eliška’s house. However, so far historians have not found any proof of such an assertion, just some indications that the house belonged to the Premyslid Dynasty. Exhibits will include such gems as the unique royal treasure of Slezská Středa, with a crown, which might have been the one that Eliška wore for the wedding ceremony and a number of other exhibits so far unknown to the public. The main author of the exhibition is Klára Benešová. The exhibition has its own website: Stone Bell House — Royal Wedding Exhibition (available only in Czech).
