34 Best Sights in Moravia, Czech Republic

One of Moravia's most impressive castles, 30 km (18 miles) west of Olomouc, has been featured in several fairy-tale films. Its present romanticized exterior comes from a remodeling at the turn of the 20th century, but the basic structure dates back to the 1300s. Owned by the Order of Teutonic Knights from the late 1600s up to the end of World War II, it was later confiscated by the state. Inside, the knights' hall has extensive carved-wood decorations and wall paintings that look old, even if many are reconstructions. Other rooms have collections of period furniture. The castle kitchen, which was used until 1945, is one of the best-preserved examples. The castle offers several tours, some aimed at children and one that shows off the wedding hall and knights' hall. You can easily arrange a tour from the tourist information office in Olomouc; the castle is included in the Olomouc Region Card.

Mikulov's massive cemetery with 4,000 tombs is not far from Husova ulice, just off Brněnská. The cemetery dates to shortly after 1421 when Jews were forced to leave Vienna and Lower Austria. The oldest legible stone is from 1605 and the most recent are from the 19th century, giving a wide range of stylistic flourishes. Step into the ceremonial hall to view an exhibit of the cemetery's history. Visits outside of opening hours and guided tours can be arranged at least two days in advance.

In the northwest corner of Horní náměstí, the eccentric Trinity Column is one of the best surviving examples of the Olomouc baroque style, which was prevalent in this region of Moravia after the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century. At 115 feet, it's the tallest column devoted to victims of the plague in the Czech Republic. The column alone (not the rest of the square) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its construction began in 1717, but it was not completed until 1754, long after the death of its principal designer, Václav Render, who left all his wealth to the city of Olomouc so that the column could be finished. Inside is a small chapel that, unfortunately, is never open.

This main square is so perfect you feel like you've stepped into a painting, not a living town. Zacharias of Neuhaus, the square's namesake, allegedly created the architectural unity. During the 16th century, so the story goes, the wealthy Zacharias had the castle—originally a small fort—rebuilt into a Renaissance château. But the town's dull buildings clashed so badly that Zacharias had the square rebuilt to match the castle's splendor.

From the south side of town, walk through the Great Gate, part of the original fortifications dating to the 13th century. As you approach on Palackého ulice, the square unfolds in front of you, graced with the château at the northern end and beautiful houses bathed in pastel ice-cream shades. Fans of Renaissance reliefs should note the sgraffito corner house at No. 15. The house at No. 61, across from the Černý Orel Hotel, also bears intricate details.

The Château Lednice na Moravé, 12 km (7 miles) east of Mikulov, is a must-see. The dining room alone, with resplendent blue-and-green silk wall coverings embossed with the Moravian eagle, makes the visit memorable. The grounds have a 200-foot-tall minaret and a massive greenhouse filled with exotic flora. The minaret halls have been recently restored. A horse-drawn carriage ride and a romantic boat ride are available and are a great way to see the grounds. The absolute splendor of the palace and gardens contrasts sharply with the workaday reality of the town of Lednice. Tickets can be bought online to save time.

Arts and crafts shine in this museum, which is without a doubt the Czech Republic's best venue to see applied arts. It has an assemblage of artifacts far more extensive than the truncated collection in Prague's museum of the same name. The collection includes Gothic and art nouveau pieces, as well as an excellent, comprehensive overview of Bohemian and Moravian glass. Keep an eye out for the elegant furniture from Josef Hoffmann's Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop). Milan Knížák's jagged, candy-color table provides a striking example of contemporary work.

A Cold War–era relic, this highly classified (hence the "10-Z" code name) shelter was designed to protect the political elite of the region in the event of a nuclear attack. Built during the Nazi occupation in World War II as a bomb shelter, between 1945 and 1948 it was used by a wine wholesaler, after which it served as a secret shelter until 1989. Up to 500 people could have stayed inside if needed, but fortunately no one had to. It was declassified and opened to the public in 2015. There is an exhibition about the Cold War at the entrance with English text. Guided group tours of the whole complex with a flashlight (provided) take place as well, with some at night. On the tour you can see underground offices, a phone switchboard, heavy doors, and other curious infrastructure. The entrance is across the street from Husova 12. Tour tickets are available at the Tourist Information Center at Panenská 1.

This ornate complex is home to treasures from the collections of the archdiocese, including golden monstrances, religious paintings, carved ivory objects, and a full-sized gilded coach. Modern art is also displayed in part of the building complex and included in the same admission, but it is often a bit disappointing in comparison. In 1767 the young musical prodigy Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, age 11, spent six weeks recovering from a mild attack of chicken pox and completed his Sixth Symphony here. The 16-year-old King Wenceslas III suffered a much worse fate here in 1306, when he was murdered, putting an end to the Přemyslid dynasty.

The late Romanesque and early Gothic St. Procopius Basilica remains true to its original layout from 1260. New sections were added as recently as the 1950s, but the oldest parts are easy to spot. Look for a very heavy style, with lots of stone and few windows. Two baroque towers at the front were added in the early 1700s by architect F. M. Kaňka. One of the oldest sections is the crypt, with Romanesque pillars and arches. The château next door has been fully renovated and houses the Vysočina Museum Třebíč.

Nothing is left of the original Church of St. Maurice that stood just north of Horní náměstí in 1257. This is a new church started in 1412 on the same site and remodeled many times. Its current fierce, gray exterior dates to the middle of the 16th century. A sculpture of Christ on the Mount of Olives dates to the 15th century. The baroque organ inside, the largest in the Czech Republic, originally contained 2,311 pipes until it was expanded in the 1960s to more than 10,000 pipes. An international organ festival takes place in the church every September. The tower is sometimes open to the public, depending on the weather. A large renovation was finished in 2021.

Best admired from a distance, the silhouette of slim neo-Gothic twin spires—added in the 20th century—give the cathedral a touch of Gothic dignity. Up close, the interior is light and tasteful but hardly mind-blowing. The treasury and tower can be visited for a fee. The crypt can be visited on request if it is closed. This is the church pictured on the face of the 10 Kč coin.

Between the main square and this cathedral lies a peaceful neighborhood given over to huge buildings, mostly belonging either to the university or the archbishop. The church itself is impressive, but its Gothic appearance comes only from a 19th-century makeover. A shrine has an ornate case with the relics of St. Jan Sarkander, a 17th-century priest who was tortured. A plaque marks the fact that Pope John Paul II celebrated mass there in 1995. The crypt, which has erratic hours depending on exhibitions, has a marble box with the heart of an archduke who otherwise is buried in Vienna. Some ecclesiastical treasures are also on display.

Once among the most feared places in the Habsburg Empire, this fortress-cum-prison still broods over Brno behind menacing walls. The castle's advantageous location brought the early lords of the city, who moved here during the 13th century from neighboring Petrov Hill. Successive rulers gradually converted the old castle into a virtually impregnable fortress. It withstood the onslaughts of Hussites, Swedes, and Prussians over the centuries; only Napoléon, in 1809, succeeded in occupying the fortress. But the castle's fame comes from its gruesome history as a prison for enemies of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and later for the Nazis' prisoners during World War II. The hardest offenders were shackled day and night in dank, dark catacombs and fed only bread and water. The castle complex is large, and the various parts generally require separate admission. The casemates (passages within the walls of the castle) have been turned into an exhibition of the late-18th-century prison and their Nazi-era use as an air-raid shelter. You can see the entire castle grounds as well as the surrounding area from the observation tower. Aboveground, a museum in the fortress starts off with more displays on the prison era with detailed English texts. Included in the tour of the museum are exhibitions of objects from Brno's history and art from the Renaissance to modern times from the city's collection.

Admission and opening hours vary according to what you want to see and where you want to go, that is, the entire complex, various combinations of exhibits, or individual castle sections.

What's left of Mikulov's once-thriving Jewish Quarter can be seen on a stroll down Husova ulice, which was once its center. An information board near the corner with Brněnská ulice explains the significance of the community and what happened to it. The most important building still standing is the 16th-century Altschul. The community once numbered several thousand people, and the town was the seat of the chief rabbi of Moravia from the 17th to the 19th century. Several respected Talmudic scholars, including Rabbis Jehuda Loew and David Oppenheimer, lived and taught here.

A spiraling maze of winding streets, the Jewish Quarter has two synagogues and other buildings formerly used by the town's Jewish community. The Front Synagogue on Tiché náměstí is now used for Protestant services. Several houses in the district are intriguing, including a pink Renaissance house with an overhanging second floor at Pokorný 5. A trail of signs in English points out the remarkable spots. Remember your manners—most houses in this area are not museums, and people actually live in them.

The Jewish Cemetery has 3,000 tombstones dating from the Renaissance up to the 20th century. It's free to enter, but guided tours can be arranged. The cemetery is closed on Saturday, but almost all of it can be seen from the gate and the low wall.

Formerly part of the Capuchin Monastery, the Church of the Holy Cross combines a baroque form with a rather stark façade. Enter the krypta (crypt) in the basement, and the mummified remains of some 200 nobles and monks from the late 17th and 18th centuries are displayed, ingeniously preserved by a natural system of air circulating through vents and chimneys. The best-known mummy is Col. František Trenck, commander of the brutal Pandour regiment of the Austrian army, who, at least in legend, spent several years in the dungeons of Spielberg Castle before finding his final rest here in 1749. A note of caution about the crypt: the graphic displays can be frightening to children (and even some adults), so ask at the admission desk for a small brochure with pictures that preview what's to come, or look at the postcards for sale. Locals refer to the building simply as the Capuchin Church.

A tiny street leading off the main square takes you to the 160-foot Romanesque tower of the Church of the Holy Spirit, a solid tower finished off in conical gray peaks. This is the oldest standing structure in Telč, dating to the first quarter of the 13th century. The interior, however, is a confused hodgepodge, as the style was fiddled with repeatedly, first in a late-Gothic makeover and then refashioned again because of fire damage.

In the summer months, the tower is open for a small entrance fee.

The interior of this triple-domed church casts a dramatic spell. The frescoes, the high and airy central dome, and the shades of rose, beige, and gray trompe-l'oeil marble on walls and arches work in concert to present a harmonious whole. The decoration followed a fire in 1709, only 30 years after the original construction. Another renovation took place in the 1890s. The architect and builder are not known, but it's surmised they are the same team that put up the Church of the Annunciation on Svatý Kopeček (Holy Hill), a popular Catholic pilgrimage site just outside Olomouc.

Several basement rooms in the tunnels next to the St. James Church are filled with neatly stacked bones, making it one of the largest ossuaries in Europe. Sealed up since the late 1700s, its contents were unearthed in 2001 and were cleaned after years of neglect before being opened to the public in 2012. Remains of some 50,000 people are estimated to be in the rooms, including victims of plagues, epidemics, and wars from the 13th to 18th centuries. It is much larger than the famous ossuary in Kutná Hora in Central Bohemia, which has bones in decorative designs. At one of the upper windows of the church, as seen from the street, there is a sculpture of a monk exposing his backside toward a rival church across town.

Some 2,296 feet of underground passages are filled with exhibits relating to alchemy, medicine, medieval punishment, and the more mundane aspects of life—like storing wine. Some of the old passages were rediscovered in the 1970s and have undergone years of archeological research before opening to the public in 2011. Unfortunately, explanatory plaques are only in Czech.

Moravia's strong artistic ties to Austria can be seen in the impressive collection of painting and sculpture found in this splendid palace. The museum is divided into sections, but the most impressive part—art from the Gothic period to the 19th century—is on the first floor. The short-term exhibits are often a bit disappointing.

A small but singular museum devoted to the culture of the Roma, as Gypsies prefer to be called, is halfway between Brno's historical center and the high-rise housing projects. To foster cross-cultural understanding (as Roma people are often the victims of discrimination), this museum is dedicated to their culture and history. Exhibits deal with traditional occupations, dress, and lifestyles. A study room has documents and photographs.

The best place to start any walking tour, this is the focal point of the city and a centerpiece for the massive effort to modernize the area. The square underwent extensive renovation in 2006, and adjoining streets feature some of the city's best shopping. Anyone who has been to Vienna might experience déjà vu here, as many of the buildings were designed by 19th-century Austrian architects. Especially noteworthy is the stolid Klein Palace at No. 15, built by Theophil Hansen and Ludwig Foerster, both prominent for their work on Vienna's Ringstrasse. A highly controversial clock—it's supposed to look like a bullet and remind people of a battle that happened in 1645—was added in 2010; most people, however, say it looks more like—ahem—a sex toy than a bullet. Also, you need a pamphlet to explain how to read the time on it. The clock drops a glass ball on the hour, which people try to catch.

The largest collection of modern and contemporary Czech art outside of Prague lines the walls of this handsome, 19th-century neo-Renaissance building. If you've already seen these same artists represented in Prague's major galleries, you may be tempted to adopt a been-there-done-that attitude. But the emphasis here is on Moravian artists, who tended to prefer rural themes—their avant-garde concoctions have a certain folksy flavor. Modern and contemporary art is on the second floor; other sections have temporary exhibits.

Olomouc's central square is marked by the bright, spire-bedecked Renaissance Town Hall with its 220-foot tower. The tower was constructed in the late 14th century. The modern socialist-realist mosaic decorations of the current clock on the face of the tower date to 1955. It replaced an astronomical clock built in 1422 that once rivaled the one in Prague. It was mostly destroyed by an artillery shell on the last two days of World War II. Be sure to look inside the Town Hall at the beautiful stairway. You can also visit a large Gothic banquet room in the main building, with scenes from the city's history, and a late-Gothic chapel. The Town Hall was renovated in late 2019 and early 2020, and the wooden interior of the tower was completely rebuilt. Tours of the tower are given several times daily; tours of the rest of the building are by appointment. An audio guide to the city can be borrowed from the information center in the Town Hall.

The Rear Synagogue has an exhibition of Jewish religious items and a wooden model of the ghetto as it was in the 1800s. A touch screen attached to the model provides audio information about the various buildings, with English as an option. Guided tours to the synagogue are available and include a tour of the house of Seligmann Bauer.

Next to the Cathedral of St. Wenceslas is a complex of buildings that for centuries were the center of the archdiocese. The oldest, commonly called Palác Přemyslovců (Přemyslid Palace), houses a museum where you can see early-16th-century wall paintings decorating the Gothic cloisters and, upstairs, a wonderful series of Romanesque windows and displays of sculpted stonework fragments. This part of the building was used as a schoolroom some 700 years ago, and you can still make out drawings of animals engraved on the walls by young vandals.

Just inside the door of the oldest secular building in Brno, dating to the 13th century, are the remains of two famous Brno legends, the Brno Dragon and the wagon wheel. The dragon—actually an alligator—apparently turned up at the town walls one day in the 17th century and began eating children and livestock. As the story goes, a gatekeeper came up with the idea of stuffing a freshly slaughtered goat with limestone. The dragon devoured the goat, swallowing the limestone as well, and when it drank at a nearby river, the water mixed with the limestone and burst the dragon's stomach (the scars on the preserved dragon's stomach are still clearly visible). The story of the wagon wheel, on the other hand, concerns a bet placed some 400 years ago that a young wheelwright, JiřÌ Birek, couldn't chop down a tree, form the wood into a wheel, and roll it from his home at Lednice (53 km [33 miles] away) to the town walls of Brno—all between sunup and sundown. The wheel stands as a lasting tribute to his achievement. (The townspeople, however, became convinced that JiřÌ had enlisted the help of the devil to win the bet, so they stopped frequenting his workshop; poor JiřÌ died penniless.)

No longer the seat of the town government, the Old Town Hall holds exhibitions and performances and the town's tourist information office. To find out what's on, ask in the information center just inside Pilgram's portal. The view from the top of the tower is one of the best in Brno, but the climb (five flights) is strenuous.

This Gothic castle was transformed into a refined Renaissance château by Italian masters between 1553 and 1568. Grouped in a complex with the former Jesuit college and Kostel sv. Jakuba (Church of St. James), the castle was built during the 14th century, perhaps by King John of Luxembourg, the father of Charles IV. In season you can tour the castle and admire the rich Renaissance interiors. The chastising sgraffito relief in the dining room depicting gluttony (in addition to the six other deadly sins) seems oddly placed. Other interesting rooms with sgraffiti include the Treasury, the Armory, and the Blue and Gold Chambers. There are two tours: the first, Tour A, goes through the Renaissance chambers and is available in English; the second, Tour B, displays the rooms that were used as recently as 1945 but is available only in Czech. The castle basement and gardens are also accessible.