Convent of St Agnes of Bohemia, Medieval monastery in Old Town, Czech Republic

The convent of St Agnes is a double monastery on the Vltava bank in Prague's Old Town, founded in 1231 by Agnes of Bohemia for the Poor Clares and the Friars Minor. Its oldest sacred space, the church of St Francis, was built without a presbytery and consecrated in 1234; the cloister of the Poor Clares was reduced from eight to six vaulted bays per arm. The mausoleum begun after 1253, with a nave of two rib-vaulted bays ending in a pentagonal apse, was built by an unnamed French master.

Agnes of Bohemia established the site in 1231 with her brother King Wenceslas I as the first Gothic building in Prague. The princess herself joined the community as a Poor Clare and led it until her death in 1282.

The east wing houses a collection of medieval paintings and sculpture produced by Bohemian workshops between the 13th and 16th centuries. The rooms display altarpieces and carved wooden figures that once adorned churches and chapels across the land.

The convent stands in Prague's Old Town, in the Na Františku quarter on the right bank of the Vltava, near the river. The complex is entered through a courtyard enclosed by a low wall and metal railing; the buildings are grouped around it, with the church of St Francis and the chapels of the Virgin Mary and St Salvator at the core. Look for the tall portal on the south wall of the presbytery, where the original red and blue polychromy of the tympanum survives.

Wenceslas I was buried in 1253 in a sandstone tomb in the axis of the presbytery of St Francis, and his wife Kunigunde of Swabia in a similar tomb opposite the altar of the Virgin Mary. The chapel of St Salvator, modelled on the Parisian Sainte-Chapelle, held the kingdom's most precious relics, including Ottokar II's cross with a fragment of the Holy Cross, now in the cathedral treasury at Regensburg.