🇨🇿 Czechia · Moravia and the east
Olomouc is Moravia's great secret: a human-sized city with a historic centre on a monumental scale, almost as rich as Prague's but without the crowds or the prices. It was the historic capital of Moravia and a bishop's seat from the eleventh century, and that past of ecclesiastical and university power left an extraordinary crop of baroque squares, churches, palaces and fountains that today you walk almost alone. At the centre of it all rises the Holy Trinity Column, a 35-metre baroque tower declared a World Heritage Site in its own right.
But Olomouc is not a sleeping museum city. Palacký University, heir to the Jesuit academy of 1573, fills it with students, cheap bars, cafés and a young energy you feel on every corner. It is a city for strolling unhurried between its two great connected squares, timing your midday in front of its very curious astronomical clock — remade in 1955 in socialist realist style, with workers and scientists instead of saints — counting the six baroque fountains scattered around the centre and getting lost on the Cathedral hill.
This guide covers the essentials of Olomouc with a practical eye: what to see on the two squares and the episcopal hill, how to arrive by train from Prague or Brno, how to get around by tram (there is no metro here), what to eat — including the legendary and pungent tvarůžky cheeses — and what trips to make nearby. If you are looking for the authentic, cultured and inexpensive Czechia, away from the usual circuit, Olomouc is one of the best bets in the country.
Olomouc grew up on an old Slavic settlement of Great Moravia and developed around a castle of the Přemyslid dynasty and a bishopric founded in 1063, which made it the spiritual and political heart of Moravia. In 1306, in its castle, King Wenceslas III was murdered, and with him died out the Přemyslid dynasty that had ruled Bohemia and Moravia for centuries. In 1573 the Jesuits founded a university — the second oldest in the country — and Olomouc became a bastion of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. The Thirty Years' War and the Swedish occupation (1642-1650) devastated it, and in 1641 it lost the status of Moravian capital to Brno. It recovered as a baroque city and a Habsburg military fortress: from that period come the Trinity Column, raised after the plague, and the six fountains. In 1848, fleeing the revolution in Vienna, the imperial court took refuge here: in Olomouc the emperor Ferdinand I abdicated and the young Franz Joseph was proclaimed. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The other Czech land: cradle of Great Moravia and of Cyril and Methodius, with Olomouc and its old archbishopric, Brno and Mendel's garden, Renaissance Telč, the southern vineyards and the designed landscape of Lednice-Valtice.
Read the history of Moravia and the east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Legend says it was Julius Caesar who founded Olomouc and gave it its name — Iuliomontium, 'Julius's hill' — and that is why its most imposing fountain shows the Roman emperor on horseback. The reality is less epic but just as ancient: the Romans never came this far north, and the city's true origin lies with the Slavic peoples. As early as the seventh century there was a fortified settlement (a gord) in what is now the Povel district, which served as an administrative centre until it was destroyed at the beginning of the ninth century.
The nucleus that would give rise to the city appeared later at Předhradí, where a governor of the empire of Great Moravia lived, the first great Slavic state in central Europe. When Great Moravia collapsed around the year 907 under Magyar pressure, that settlement survived and grew little by little until it became the capital of the province of Moravia. Sitting at a ford of the river Morava, in the heart of the fertile Haná plain, Olomouc occupied a natural crossroads of trade routes between Bohemia, Silesia, Austria and Hungary, and that strategic position would shape its whole destiny.
With the consolidation of the Czech state under the Přemyslid dynasty, Olomouc became the seat of a principality and one of the bastions of power in Moravia. On the hill we now call Dómské návrší ('the Cathedral hill') a ducal castle was raised, and the city began to take shape as the great political and military centre of the eastern half of the kingdom.
The event that fixed Olomouc's importance for good was the founding of the bishopric of Moravia in 1063. From then on the city was not only a centre of political power but, above all, the spiritual heart of the whole of Moravia: for almost a thousand years the religious life of the region was governed from here. In 1141 the episcopal seat moved from the church of St Peter (now gone) to that of St Wenceslas, on the castle hill, where the cathedral still stands today.
A key figure of those centuries was Bishop Jindřich Zdík (in office between 1126 and 1150), a cultivated and well-travelled prelate who drove the reform of the Moravian Church and had a magnificent Romanesque episcopal palace built beside the cathedral. That Přemyslid Palace, with its paired windows and carved stone, is today one of the jewels of Czech Romanesque architecture and the core of the present Archdiocesan Museum. The bishopric accumulated enormous property and became one of the richest in the region; in 1777 it would be raised to the rank of archbishopric.
Through the Middle Ages, Olomouc grew as a royal city. It was officially refounded as a city in the thirteenth century, ringed itself with walls and competed on equal terms with Brno for the title of Moravia's leading town. Kings and nobles chose it as a stage for meetings and treaties: in 1479, for example, the Peace of Olomouc was signed here between two kings disputing the crown of Bohemia, Vladislaus Jagiellon and Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, who divided the lands of the Czech crown between them.
The most dramatic episode in the history of Olomouc happened on 4 August 1306. The young king Wenceslas III (Václav III), barely sixteen or seventeen years old, was in the city preparing a military campaign towards Poland, whose crown he also claimed. He was resting in the house of the dean of the chapter, Budislav — on today's Wenceslas Square, beside the cathedral — when he was stabbed to death by an assassin whose identity and motives were never fully cleared up. The chronicles mention a certain Konrad of Botenstein, but the crime remained shrouded in mystery.
The assassination had enormous consequences. Wenceslas III was king of Bohemia, of Hungary and of Poland, and with his death — without male issue — the Přemyslid dynasty died out completely, having ruled the Czech lands without interruption since the ninth century, more than four hundred years. The Bohemian throne fell vacant and a succession crisis opened that would end by bringing the House of Luxembourg to power: a few years later John of Luxembourg would marry Elizabeth Přemyslid and found a new dynasty, whose crowning figure would be the emperor Charles IV.
That the last of the Přemyslids should fall precisely in Olomouc is one of those coincidences that mark a city's memory. The site of the crime remained tied for ever to the cathedral and the episcopal hill, and it is still remembered as the point where one of the great dynasties of European history came to an end.
The sixteenth century brought Olomouc a new engine of prestige: education. In 1573 the Jesuits founded an academy here with university status, within the framework of the Counter-Reformation and of the effort to reassert Catholicism against Protestantism. It was the second university centre in the Czech lands after Charles University in Prague, and it made Olomouc an intellectual beacon of Moravia. Today's Palacký University descends from that institution and is now one of the country's most important and the young soul of the city.
The seventeenth century, by contrast, nearly ruined everything. The Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), which bled the whole of central Europe, hit Olomouc especially hard. In 1642 the Swedish army took the city and occupied it for eight years, until 1650. The occupation was devastating: the population collapsed from more than 30,000 inhabitants to barely a few thousand, many buildings were left in ruins and the economy sank. Olomouc came out of the war a shadow of what it had been.
That disaster sealed a decisive change. In 1641, in the middle of the war, the institutions and the provincial diet of Moravia moved to Brno, considered safer and better defended. Although Olomouc remained the seat of the bishopric and an important city, it lost for ever its role as administrative capital of Moravia to its old rival. The wound of that loss shaped the city's identity for generations.
Despite the catastrophe, Olomouc was reborn in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with extraordinary force, and it did so in a baroque key. With the backing of the rich archbishopric and of the religious orders, the city filled with churches, palaces, colleges and, above all, the famous fountains decorated with gods and heroes of antiquity, built between 1683 and 1735. That commitment to classical mythology fed the pride of a city that felt itself heir to imperial Rome through the Caesar legend.
The monument that sums up that splendour is the Holy Trinity Column, raised between 1716 and 1754. Like so many columns of this kind in central Europe, it began as a votive offering: thanks for the end of a plague epidemic that had swept the region at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and a monumental statement of Catholic faith. At 35 metres, it is the largest baroque sculptural group of its kind on the continent, and the empress Maria Theresa herself attended its inauguration in 1754. In the year 2000, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site.
In the eighteenth century, Olomouc took on a new role: that of a great Habsburg military fortress. Maria Theresa ringed it with powerful walls and bastions to halt the Prussian advance, and the city proved its worth when Frederick the Great besieged it unsuccessfully for seven weeks in 1758. Turned into a stronghold, Olomouc was hemmed in by its fortifications for more than a century, which held back its expansion but also preserved its historic core intact. When the walls were pulled down in the nineteenth century, their place was taken by the parks that surround the centre today.
In the autumn of 1848, with Europe shaken by the liberal revolutions and Vienna in turmoil, the Habsburg imperial court sought refuge in the safety of the Olomouc fortress. There an event of European scope took place: on 2 December 1848 the emperor Ferdinand I abdicated and his young nephew Franz Joseph I was proclaimed emperor; he was only eighteen and would reign for almost seventy years, until 1916. Shortly afterwards, in 1850, Olomouc was again the stage for high politics with the so-called 'Punctation of Olmütz', the agreement by which Austria forced Prussia to restore the German Confederation.
The twentieth century brought light and shadow. After the fall of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918, Olomouc became part of the new Czechoslovakia. The city had a Jewish community that had revived strongly after the revolution of 1848 and that by the beginning of the twentieth century had its own synagogue. Nazism annihilated it: on Kristallnacht, in November 1938, the synagogue was burned down, and during the occupation the city's Jews were deported to Theresienstadt and to the extermination camps. Fewer than three hundred survived the Holocaust.
From the post-war years and the communist regime an unusual symbol survives. The Town Hall astronomical clock, damaged by a shell in the last days of the war in 1945, was rebuilt between 1947 and 1955 by the artist Karel Svolinský in the official style of the moment, socialist realism: instead of saints and apostles, its figures show workers, farmers, athletes and scientists, a unique record of how public art was put at the service of ideology. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 and the peaceful separation of Czechia and Slovakia in 1993, Olomouc found its present role: a vibrant, affordable university city with the second largest protected historic ensemble in the country, which today is recovering the pride of having been, for centuries, the capital of Moravia.