Teplá Monastery
The Premonstratensian monastery founded in 1193 — its abbots once founded Marienbad itself. The highlight is the magnificent library of some 100,000 volumes, among the largest monastic libraries in Bohemia.
Photo: VitVit · CC BY-SA 4.0At a glance
Drive time
~20 min by car
Distance
~13 km
Time on site
1.5–2.5 h
Effort
easy
Good for
About the place
The Premonstratensian monastery was founded in 1193 by the Bohemian nobleman Hroznata, later beatified, whose remains still rest in the abbey church of the Annunciation — a Romanesque-Gothic building consecrated in 1232. The complex received its baroque face around 1700 from Christoph and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer. And it was the abbots of Teplá who founded Marienbad on monastery land.
The highlight of the tour is the monastic library of some hundred thousand volumes — the second largest in Bohemia, with a hall whose frescoes take your breath away. After decades of devastation, when the complex housed army barracks, the monastery is slowly returning to life: with a park, an inn, a monastery shop — and once again a living religious community.
