Lumbe's villa, Empire style villa in Hradčany, Prague, Czech Republic
Lumbe's villa is a single-storey, pale yellow house with a dark hipped roof of rectangular slates, standing on U Brusnice street in Hradčany, northwest of the Prague Castle riding school. Its front has a central projecting bay under a triangular pediment with relief decoration, a white-framed doorway with glass panes behind a black metal railing, and tall multi-paned windows with white trim between white pilasters. A fence of brown horizontal slats between stone gate pillars runs in front.
The plots served as a burial ground in the early Middle Ages; in the 1970s and 1980s Ivan Borkovský and Miroslava Blajerová excavated one of the largest Slavic cemeteries here, with 10th-century graves attributed to the Přemyslid princely court. In 1852 the physician and politician Karel Lumbe bought house no. 188 from Heliodor Heindl and had it rebuilt in a plain late Neoclassical style. The state purchased it from Lumbe's heirs in 1925; after decades as staff housing and a warehouse, it was converted in the 1990s into accommodation for official state visits.
The name comes from Karel Lumbe, the Prague physician and politician who bought the house in 1852 and had it rebuilt in a plain late Neoclassical style; his brother Josef Tadeáš Lumbe owned a separate house in Černínská Street. Since 2004 the building has served as the representative residence of the Czech head of state.
The building is not open for regular visits, as it currently serves as an official residence. Visitors can observe the exterior architecture and portal from the surrounding streets, though access to the interior is restricted.
The garden grounds were one of the largest Slavic burial sites with 10th-century skeleton graves, excavated by Ivan Borkovský and anthropologist Miroslava Blajerová in the 1970s and 1980s. More than 75% of the buried were women, and the finds were studied until 2014.
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