Zdar nad sazavou

Zdar nad Sazavou, a town of 25,000, lies in the Sazava River valley in the middle of the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands, in a region known as the Zdarske vrchy (Zdar Heights). The town was founded in the middle of the 13th century, as Zdar (Czech for 'a clearing burnt out of the forest') by Pribyslav of Krizanov, which coincided with the establishment of a Cistercian monastery by Bocek of Obrany. The defining moment of the monastery's and town's architecture came under the abbot Vaclav Vejmluva, during the period of Czech Counter-Reformation in the 18th century, when the talented Giovanni Santini (also referred to as Jan Blazej Santini Aichel) was given the task of large-scale reconstruction of the monastery and other church buildings in the area. He combined the previously existing Gothic forms with Baroque ones and a special flair all his own. He worked in the area for twenty years, and the majority of his completed works, over one hundred, are in the Zdar region.

The monastery church and its buildings are good examples of Santini's work, but the best is the pilgrim's church on nearby Zelena hora (Green Hill), the Church of St. John of Nepomuk (sv. Jan Nepomucky), which is on UNESCO's list of world cultural heritage sites. The church is fashioned as a five-pointed star, topped by a dome reminiscent of a Byzantine church. On the monastery grounds is a stable designed by Santini himself which now serves as a museum, with an exhibit dedicated to his work in the area as well as the rest of the country.