Kutná Hora owes everything to silver. Ore was found in the hills east of Prague in the late thirteenth century, and a rush of miners turned scattered settlements into a royal town so productive that for a time it supplied a large share of Europe’s silver. In 1300 King Wenceslas II issued the Ius regale montanorum, one of the earliest mining codes in Europe, and concentrated the kingdom’s minting at the Italian Court (Vlašský dvůr), named after the Florentine specialists who introduced the Prague groschen struck there.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Kutná Hora was the second city of Bohemia after Prague and a favoured residence of Wenceslas IV, who rebuilt the Italian Court as a palace. It was here in 1409 that he issued the Decree of Kutná Hora, which handed control of Prague’s university to the Bohemian ‘nation’ and Jan Hus’s party. The miners and German patricians sided against the Hussites, and the town changed hands repeatedly during the Hussite wars, with mine shafts used as mass graves.
The buildings reflect the money. The Cathedral of St Barbara, patron of miners, was begun in 1388 by Peter Parler’s workshop as a church meant to rival St Vitus in Prague; work stopped when the mines faltered and the west end was only completed in 1905. The Stone House, the Stone Fountain of 1495 and the burghers’ houses on the squares date from the same late-Gothic boom, and the Jesuit College on the terrace above the valley was added in the 1660s. At Sedlec, a short way east, the Cistercian abbey founded in 1142 has a cathedral reworked by Santini-Aichel around 1700 and the ossuary whose bones, from perhaps 40,000 people, were arranged into chandeliers and coats of arms in 1870.
The mines were exhausted by the early eighteenth century, the mint closed in 1727 and the town dwindled, which is why so much Gothic fabric survived. The historic centre with St Barbara and the Sedlec cathedral was inscribed by UNESCO in 1995. Kutná Hora is about an hour by train from Prague; the Czech Museum of Silver runs tours into a medieval mine gallery, and the Royal Silvering festival in June fills the park below the Italian Court.
