Žďár nad Sázavou audiotours

Zdar nad Sazavou sits in the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands at one of the highest inhabited points in the Czech Republic, and the altitude gives it a quality of light and air that feels distinct from the lowland Czech cities. The town grew up around a Cistercian monastery founded in 1252, and it spent centuries as a modest market settlement in the forested highlands. Then in 1719 the Czech Baroque architect Jan Santini Aichel, who invented a style now called Baroque Gothic for its eerie combination of medieval structural logic and Baroque ornamentation, built the Pilgrimage Church of Saint John of Nepomuk on the nearby hill of Zelena Hora. UNESCO added it to the World Heritage List in 1994.

The church is genuinely unusual.

Built to honor the canonization of St. John of Nepomuk, the Bohemian martyr thrown from Prague's Charles Bridge by King Wenceslaus IV in 1393, it uses the number five obsessively throughout its geometry: five-sided nave, five exterior chapels, five-pointed star cloisters. Santini designed the whole complex as a coded architectural homage to the saint, and the more you read about it the more you find. After World War II, the communist government built a large engineering works called ZDAS here, which tripled the population and gave the town its current industrial character alongside the pilgrimage heritage. Both layers coexist with a pragmatic Czech ease.