Praha 8 Has Finished the Chapel at the Bohnice Asylum Cemetery, and It Has No Roof

Praha 8 has completed the rebuilding of the chapel at the cemetery in Bohnice that was used to bury patients of the psychiatric hospital, and showed it to journalists on 17 September. The work cost the district about 8.5 million crowns excluding VAT and started at the end of last year. The chapel opens to the public for the first time on Thursday 1 October at 5pm.

What was done

The architectural study is by the studio OHA architects, and the decision that governs everything else is that the new chapel stands on the walls of the old one. Those walls were what survived: the building was wrecked by vandals and then by a fire, after which, as ČTK puts it, practically only the perimeter remained. Jiří Vítek, deputy mayor of Praha 8, said that when the rebuild began the ruin was in a state where collapse was a risk.

The walls now carry a new grey façade. Where the roof was there is an open steel structure, which the district says is meant to evoke a crown of thorns. The former mortuary at the side will hold an exhibition about the restoration itself.

We wanted to bring something more modern, timeless, but at the same time with respect for history and for the place.

— Radomír Nepil (ANO), deputy mayor of Praha 8 (translated from the Czech)

The chapel is to be used for quiet remembrance, memorial gatherings, guided tours and smaller educational events. Nepil was explicit about the ceiling on that programme.

We do not want to turn this into any kind of variety show, but we want the place to have its dignity, so that people can walk here and meditate.

— Radomír Nepil (ANO), deputy mayor of Praha 8 (translated from the Czech)

The site

The cemetery lies west of the psychiatric hospital, near an allotment colony and an animal cemetery. It was founded in 1909, six years after the opening of what was then the Provincial Institution for the Insane in Bohnice. About 4,300 people were buried there over the following decades. Burials ended in the 1950s, after which the grounds fell derelict and grew over. Only a handful of headstones are left.

The recovery has been slow and mostly administrative. In 2013 Vítek — now deputy mayor, for Patrioti pro Prahu 8 — took an interest in a site full of construction waste and dumped appliances and began clearing it. In 2018 the cemetery passed from the state to the city free of charge, and into the property administration of Praha 8, which then began preparing a full revitalisation. Thirteen years from the first clearance to a finished building is the actual timescale of this kind of work on a district budget.

Today there stands here a building that recalls specific human fates and can serve further generations. For a long time I did not believe we would manage to build something so striking, something that can outlive us by 100 and perhaps more years.

— Jiří Vítek (Patrioti pro Prahu 8), deputy mayor of Praha 8 (translated from the Czech)

What is still to come

The chapel is the first finished piece, not the end of the scheme. The architectural study also covers repairing the mound in the northern part of the grounds that commemorates soldiers and victims of the First World War, restoring the cross on the main axis of the cemetery opposite the chapel, rebuilding part of the historic paths, work on the planting, and a gradual repair of the cemetery wall. Praha 8 has not said when any of that is funded for.