A leisurely stroll through Nepomuk
Take a walk not only around Nepomuk’s sights and museums. The Pod Zelenou Horou (Below Green Mountain) Sightseeing Trail will take you to Klášter to see the remnants of its medieval abbey.
If you walk out of the U Zeleného Stromu Hotel and look around, the first thing to capture your attention is the exhibition building of the municipal museum, the former town hall. The original town center suggests itself as the first stop of your stroll around the town of Nepomuk. At the museum, the tour of which extends all the way to the former Piarist College, you can find an exhibition on Zelená Hora and the Black Barons, which refers to the nearby early Baroque chateau and the novel by Miloslav Švandrlík, which made the chateau complex even more famous. The museum also features an exhibition of puppets, a townhouse interior, a village interior, and other exhibits and collections mostly from the Nepomuk region. The ground floor of the museum serves as a gallery.
The town of Nepomuk can boast of being the birthplace of two famous people. The first is Saint John of Nepomuk, to whom, thanks to the Fellowship of St. John, a permanent exhibition in the local church is dedicated. In 2015, the Museum of St. John of Nepomuk was restored at the Nepomuk Archdeanery. The other famous native, master painter Augustin Němejc, has had his birth house reconstructed in the upper part of the square. The reconstruction was financed by the town of Nepomuk. The house also serves as an exhibition gallery to display his precious works. Apart from a copy of the curtain for Pilsen’s J.K. Tyl Theatre, his most precious and famous work, the gallery mainly features his original canvas works, including his last painting, Rozsévač (The Sower), which was originally intended for President T.G. Masaryk. If you want to know what the painter used Ferda, his wooden puppet, for, go and visit his birthplace.
Just a short walk above the square, at the second stop of the Below Green Mountain Sightseeing Tour, you find the building of the old Green Mountain Post Office. Emperor Joseph II spent the night there during his visit to the town. Nowadays, you can visit the Permanent Exhibition of Historical Machinery in its former stables. The space is filled with motorcycles that used to roam the roads of the Nepomuk Region in the 1920s. Also on display are Czechoslovak brands as well as a number of machines that were massively imported from Britain, France and the United States. The courtyard display is dedicated to agricultural machinery from the early 20th century, proving that the Green Mountain Post Office was once the biggest farmstead of Nepomuk.
The marked sightseeing trail will lead us to the village of Klášter, where there was once an important Cistercian monastery that was burnt down by the Hussites. Saint John himself is said to have travelled to the monastery school by boat. Apart from the Church of St. Margaret, the prominent feature of the town is the local pond, founded by Cistercian monks. From the village of Klášter, continue down the sightseeing trail past the Baroque Red Bridge and the “Footprints of St. Adalbert” Chapel back to the Nepomuk square.
