The Bloody Gallery

This gallery with its unrendered brick facade complemented the northern side of the chapter deanery in the late 19th century. As its name suggests, the main reason for the terrace was the commemoration of the murder of the last Czech king of the Přemyslid family - Wenceslas III. In the wall at today's entrance to the gallery, Dean Rudolf Thysebaert even set a marble memorial plaque that expressly claims that the Czech King Wenceslas III was murdered here on August 4, 1306. But the dean and his advisers were mistaken. The sixteen year old ruler, who had organized his campaign against Poland in Olomouc, was killed in another place - the no longer existing palace, which was located roughly in the last exhibition hall of today’s gallery on the ground floor of the museum.

Whilst we know the place of the murder at least approximately, its motives and the perpetrator seem to remain forever an unresolved mystery. Only the day of the murder is incontestable. It is likely that the killer stabbed Wenceslas III three times in the chest. Everything else is speculation. Although the Austrian Habsburgs are often referred to as the initiators of the murder, it is more likely that it was the Bohemian nobility who feared that the king would seize their property.

Let us return to the realm of fantasy, back to the Bloody Gallery. Although archaeologists and historians have deprived us of the magic of the romantic legend, the terrace itself affords beautiful and romantic views of the surrounding area. At our last stop on our journey through a thousand years of spiritual culture in Moravia we can bid our farewells to the neighbouring cathedral of St. Wenceslas, the nearby Premonstratensian monastery at Hradisko, the pilgrimage church of the Visitation of the Virgin Mary at Svatý Kopeček, and also the fertile landscape and the peaks of the Lower Jeseník Mountains. That is, a sizeable part of the country whose artistic heritage you have learned about at the Archdiocesan Museum.

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But our tour does not have to end here. The Olomouc Art Museum manages not only the collections of classical art in the Archdiocesan Museum, but also exhibits artworks from the 20th and 21st centuries in the Museum of Modern Art, which is about five minutes' walk away. You can use the audio guide again in the permanent exhibition ‘A Century of Relativity’.