The Marian Column Erected

JAN 01 1650 · 12:00

The Marian Column on Old Town Square, raised in 1650 as a Habsburg-Catholic thank-offering for the city's deliverance from the Swedish siege, torn down in November 1918, and restored 2020. Place: Old Town Square Figures: Ferdinand III, who vowed it · Johann Georg Bendl, sculptor · Franz Anton Lothar Pikl, who toppled it in 1918 Ferdinand III, present in Prague during the Swedish siege of 1648, vowed a column to the Immaculate Conception if the right bank held. It held. The column is consecrated on 13 July 1650, in the Old Town Square, fifteen meters from the spot where Mydlář had set up his scaffold twenty-nine years earlier. The Virgin in gilt bronze stands atop a sandstone column; four angels at the base spear demons named for plague, war, hunger, and heresy. It becomes the centerpiece of Counter-Reformation public ritual in Prague. The Corpus Christi procession passes it; the bishop blesses it annually; in famine years children are paraded around its base. It is also a meridian: the noon shadow on its plinth marked the city's true south until the eighteenth century.