To Glory and Praise

The Archdiocesan Museum Olomouc was founded in 1998 as a joint project of the Roman Catholic Church and the Czech state with the aim of establishing a professional institution that would research, preserve, and present monuments of spiritual artistic culture of ecclesiastical origin from the historical territory of the Olomouc Archdiocese. Based on this agreement, extensive cooperation was quickly developed between the Archbishopric of Olomouc and also the Metropolitan Chapter of St. Wenceslas in Olomouc, which provided the new museum with the historic building of the Olomouc Chapter Deanery, and the Olomouc Museum of Art, which took over the care of the monument reconstruction of the building and its professional administration. After extensive reconstruction, the museum was ceremonially opened to the public on June 1, 2006.

The establishment of the Archdiocesan Museum is significantly linked to the historic visit of John Paul II to Olomouc in 1995, when the Pope repeatedly called for its establishment. The idea of an archdiocesan museum is based not only on the continuity of spiritual tradition, reaching back to the Great Moravian period, but also on the uninterrupted line of artistic collecting and enlightened support of visual culture by the Olomouc bishops and archbishops.

The location of the museum in the district of the former princely Olomouc Přemyslid Castle on St. Wenceslas Hill fully corresponds to both the historical significance and the spiritual character of the place, which has been the seat of the episcopal church of the Moravian metropolitans since 1141. Thanks to this fact, in 2015 the Archdiocesan Museum Olomouc was awarded the prestigious "European Heritage Label", which placed it among the monuments referring to the historical and spiritual roots of Europe.

Currently, the museum offers visitors two permanent exhibitions and a rich exhibition, cultural and educational program. The museum presents a selection of the most valuable and significant of the preserved artistic wealth of the Olomouc Archdiocese in the permanent exhibition "To Glory and Praise. A Thousand Years of Spiritual Culture in Moravia". The history of the museum complex and its immediate surroundings from the oldest prehistoric settlement to the present is dedicated to the second permanent exhibition "You Are Here. St. Wenceslas Hill through the centuries."