The bent pinnacle
Directly above Justice — a sculptor's revenge for non-payment.
Radler59 (talk) — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ben Skála, Benfoto — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Ben Skála, Benfoto — CC BY-SA 3.0 · Ben Skála — CC BY-SA 4.0
The oldest secular building in Brno, dating from the thirteenth century, and the seat of the city's administration until 1935. Its best-known feature is the Gothic portal of 1511: a row of small carved pinnacles above it, of which the central one — directly above the figure of Justice — is visibly bent and crooked. The inherited story is that the sculptor Anton Pilgram was not paid what he had been promised, and took his revenge by deliberately bending the central pinnacle so that it would stand as permanent evidence of the city's crooked justice. The likelier structural explanation is damage or an error in execution, but the story is stronger than the explanation and has become part of Brno's identity. In the passage beneath the portal two things hang: the Brno dragon — in fact a stuffed crocodile presented to the city in the seventeenth century — and the wooden Brno wheel, tied to a legend of a wager in which a tree was felled, made into a wheel and rolled to the city in a single day. The tower can be climbed on a ticket.
Directly above Justice — a sculptor's revenge for non-payment.
A stuffed crocodile presented to the city in the seventeenth century.
From a wager legend: a tree felled, made a wheel and rolled in a day.
Radnická street, central Brno
The Labyrinth under the Vegetable MarketA city beneath the city: the Vegetable Market, trading since the thirteenth cent1 min walk
Holy Trinity Column, BrnoA baroque column on the vegetable market in old central Brno, raised in the earl1 min walk
Klein PalaceA mid-nineteenth-century palace on Náměstí Svobody, Brno's main square, built by2 min walk
Dominican SquareA square in old central Brno holding the New Town Hall, the Dominican monastery 2 min walk
The Moravian MuseumCzechia's second museum in age and size (1817): the Moravian Museum in the Dietr2 min walkBoth are old local legends. The wheel: a smith from the village of Lednice wagered that he would fell a tree, make a wheel from it and roll it fifty kilometres to Brno before sunset, and did — and lost his trade, because people assumed he had help from the devil. The dragon: a monster is said to have terrorised the city until a butcher killed it with a sheepskin stuffed with quicklime, which it drank on and burst. The hanging animal is a crocodile that arrived as a diplomatic gift, but people attached it to the tale.
The cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul on Petrov hill — its bells strike noon at eleven, a custom going back to a ruse that saved the city from a Swedish siege in 1645. Špilberk castle with its underground prisons. The Capuchin crypt with its mummies. And Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat, on the World Heritage list — it needs booking weeks ahead.
Sign in to write your review of this place.
No reviews yet — be the first.