Rajhrad Benedictine Monastery, Benedictine monastery in Rajhrad, Czech Republic

Rajhrad Benedictine Monastery is a walled complex of white-walled, red-roofed buildings on the Svratka river. A long two-storey wing with a hipped roof faces a taller cream-facade church block, whose two square towers with dark pointed spires and clock faces flank a niche holding a figure above an arched entry and a small columned balcony. The baroque church was built from 1722 to 1739 to plans by Santini-Aichl.

Břetislav I settled Benedictines from Břevnov here in 1048, and the monastery was raised to an independent abbey by Emperor Franz I in 1813. Cuman raids in 1253, the Hussites in 1449 and Swedish troops in 1645 each left the complex destroyed. The present church was begun in 1722 and consecrated in 1739.

The monastery library became the basis of the Memorial of Literature in Moravia, opened in 2005. Monks here wrote and copied books in the monastery scriptorium and ran a well-known monastic school. From 1880 to 1911 the abbey published the German-language Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktinerordens.

The complex sits on what is effectively an island between the Vojkovice millrace and today's Svratka, east of Rajhrad town centre; the entrance is through the iron gate in the low front wall. The monastery church of Saints Peter and Paul and the adjoining convent and prelature can be visited, and the Memorial of Writings in Moravia, based on the monastery library, has occupied the buildings since 2005. The northern wing of the prelature was never built, so the courtyard layout is visibly incomplete.

The monastery library became the basis of the Memorial of Writings in Moravia in 2005. Among the monks who shaped Moravian cultural life were the historians Beda Dudík and Řehoř Volný and the writer Pavel Vychodil.