Upon the instigation of the president of the Red Cross, Count Felix Vetter von der Lilie, in 1886 Brno’s Bishop František Saleský Bauer invited three nuns from Prague’s congregation of Grey Franciscan Sisters to establish a new monastery in Brno that would primarily serve as a hospital in case of war. In 1890 the sisters moved into a newly built three-storey convent at Sirotčí Street 18 (today Grohova Street). A year later, the Perka family sold the neighbouring house (no. 16) to Bishop Bauer, who gave it to the congregation for the construction of a church. Over the following years, the sisters also acquired no. 14, and so the groundwork was laid for a new spiritual centre for sixty members of the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of the Third Order of St. Francis. In times of peace, the sisters served as nurses at St. Anne’s Hospital and looked after private patients in their homes, but during wartime their main duty was to treat wounded soldiers, as they indeed did during the First World War.
Construction of the church was begun in 1900 by the building contractor František Přikryl. The plans were drafted by Karel Welzl, who had studied under one of Austria’s most important architects, Theophil von Hansen. Welzl came to Brno in 1884 after having previously gained experience working on the National Theatre in Prague. He quickly established himself as a teacher at the Czech technical school and collaborated with Vojtěch Dvořák on religious architecture, including renovation projects. For the Sisters of Mercy, he designed a Neo-Renaissance church with a facade set slightly back from the street line so as to create an entrance area with an outdoor staircase leading up to three entrances. The main facade of the two-storey building was accentuated by a central avant-corps with a triangular gable on top of a pair of columns. Above this was a round tower with a cupola which was destroyed during Second World War when the city was bombed in November 1944. Immediately after the war, the monastery, church and nursing school were rebuilt according to plans by Zdenek Bažant, who unified all three buildings’ facades in a late modernist spirit. As a result, the church is hidden behind a somewhat understated facade and can easily be mistaken for a regular building. Its religious purpose is manifested by Julius Pelikán’s reliefs of angels and the Holy Family. The church was most recently renovated in 1990 after the sisters returned from their forced stay in Lechovice. The renovation was overseen by Viktor Dohnal, and the church has served its original purpose ever since.
From the street, three large gates lead to the staircase in front of the original Neo-Renaissance church. The current street front thus acts as a shell hiding the older core. The interior of the church is a triple-aisle basilica clearly inspired by the Roman Renaissance (and thus also Antiquity), with a coffered ceiling over the nave, triforia above the lateral aisles and a chancel beneath the cupola visually separated from the rest of the church by a lowered triumphal arch. On the walls are richly profiled cornices, pilasters with Corinthian capitals and stucco decoration featuring floral and figural motifs. Like the church building, the interior furnishings have witnessed change over the years and provide an interesting insight into Brno’s conservative sculpture of the 20th century. The large statue of the Divine Heart of the Lord by František Prosecký dates from 1922. After the war, new altars were produced by the Kotrba brothers (apparently according to a design by Klaudius Madlmayr, with whom the brothers also collaborated on the furnishings for the church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Brno-Židenice), although two of the altars were later moved to a church in Brno-Slatina. The current altar, made during the 1990 renovation upon the instigation of supervising architect Viktor Dohnal, was produced by Miloš Vlček, a student and collaborator of Heřman Kotrba.
The Church of the Holy Family on Grohova Street is an exceptional example of Brno’s sacral architecture. The austere modernist facade hides a stylistically pure Neo-Renaissance interior form a time when most buildings in Brno, even churches, were designed in the Art Nouveau style. Only a few years after its completion, other Art Nouveau churches were built in Husovice and on Křenová Street.
Matěj Kruntorád