The history of the buildings at today's Hybernská 4 dates back to the 14th century. In the following paragraphs, you will find interesting facts about the building's past as well as information about the development of Kampus Hybernská, as the place has been called for the last few years, since the project of the same name has been operating here.
In 2016, a Memorandum of Cooperation was signed between Charles University and the Prague City Hall on the Kampus Hybernská project. The project had two program lines: the immediate revival of the building at Hybernská 4 with the project called Hybernská comes to life! and the current reconstruction of the building so that it could serve the development of the university and the city.
In 2017, Prague provided the Faculty of Arts of Charles University with a large building complex in Hybernská Street that had been unused for ten years. The Prague City Council put the buildings in a condition in which the first activities could be carried out - electricity and heating were installed, and the necessary reconstruction and adaptation works were carried out.
The empty seven-storey building started its transformation into an open community space where the public, academics, students and artists will meet with the Diversity Week festival. It was personally opened by Prof. Tomáš Zima, the then rector of Charles University. The project was implemented in 2017-2018. It was a pilot phase of the revival of Kampus - there was already a small cinema, a studio, lecture rooms, a music club with a workshop and a recording studio, a gallery, exhibition spaces, a Library of Things, a makeshift café, or a children's corner and a sandbox. The Student House was also opened, where the first student societies found their home. Among the first events held there at that time were the LUSTR festival, the Pokoje exhibition, or Design Week. The film program or theatre dramaturgy was also born.
In 2018, the Circular workshop was also opened, which, in collaboration with Prague Services and the Waste Department of the City of Prague, began repairing and redistributing damaged furniture from the waste collection yards. Its activities were followed by workshops for the public.
In 2020, HYB4 Gallery also expanded its activities from Building D to Building A, where it has since offered several exhibitions of emerging and established artists.
As of January 2021, Kampus Hybernská passed from the care of the Faculty of Arts to the entire university, based on a newly concluded partnership between the Prague City Council and Charles University. The two partners are jointly building a centre of culture, innovation, science and education for students, academics, artists and the public.
In addition to countless cultural, educational and community events, other new spaces opened in 2022 - the Didaktikon Education Centre on the 4th floor of Building A and the Circular Hub on the ground floor of the same building. Kampus Hybernská is thus still expanding its activities and offering its program to additional groups of visitors.
Since 1989, the building has housed the apartments and offices of the Ministry of the Interior, especially the workplace for the central personification of machine-readable documents.
At the turn of the 1980s-1990s, the last pavilion on the rear facade of Building D was closed.
Since 2008, the building of today's Kampus Hybernská has been owned by the City of Prague.
In 2012, the Agnieszka Holland's film Burning Bush was filmed in the building, with the theme of the self-immolation of Jan Palach, a student of the Faculty of Arts of the Charles University, in 1969 in protest against the Soviet occupation.
Immediately after the communist coup in 1948, the building was seized by the security forces. The StB protocols do not give any local information about the interrogations, so anything could have happened here. On the territory of Prague, as in Hybernská Street, there were dozens of offices of the security apparatus, interrogation rooms, dormitories, training centers, conspiracy apartments, telephone exchanges, transmitters, warehouses and garages.
In 1949 the building was taken over by the Prague municipality, and in 1952 by the Ministry of the Interior. There are virtually no sources of construction activity from the following period.
Since 1964, the building housed the rear organisations of the Ministry of the Interior, namely the Economic Department, the Health Administration, the Main Fire Protection Inspectorate, the Central Administration of Geodesy and Cartography and the Internal Administration of National Committees. The whole of Hybernská Street was an important political location for the regime. Even today, however, it is difficult to determine which branch of the Interior Ministry was housed in which building. For conspiratorial reasons, the Ministry of the Interior never gave street names and house numbers in correspondence, but only post office box numbers and post office codes. Sometimes the location of rear units could be determined at least from dislocation plans if units had to move. Period photographs of the interiors are rare, as photography was not allowed in these areas. (Source: Prokop Tomek, Estébáckou Prahou.)
The use of some parts of the premises of today's Kampus can only be estimated from the furnishings that have been partially preserved and undamaged. The metal handrails on the first floor of the front wing were probably used to handcuff people waiting for interrogation. They are preserved in the passageway. The front wing also preserved the telephone switchboard, whose cables were connected directly to Bartolomějská, the StB centre with its operations centre, where all the information obtained was gathered.
The building has been listed since 1976.
From 1880, an inscription has been preserved on the wall of today's music club, hidden under the top layers of new plaster and paint. Perhaps from the same period, there is also a clear drawing of a Jewish figure attacked by another figure with a stick.
In 1881 and 1882, a large part of the palace was converted into apartments. However, the building fell into disrepair despite a number of alterations. There were also warehouses, writing rooms, quarters with iron shutters facing the street and a bank with a money exchange. In 1903, František Jeníček's artistic joinery made new Art Nouveau commercial portals.
In 1924, according to the design of the architects T. Pražák and P. Moravec, the fourth floor extension to the main building and the back yard was allowed. In 1942, a work office was established in the main building and the ground floor was adapted into a large office hall with counters and waiting rooms.
At the beginning of the 19th century, the name Hybernská Street officially came into use.
Between 1846 and 1862, the buildings of today's Kampus Hybernská were rebuilt in the classical style according to the plans of the builder Johann Heinrich Frenzel, who was one of the leading architects of the late classical style. His architectural designs of 1846 included the demolition of the right wing of the front part of the building and a new construction on the ground floor of the original building. The new building was three storeys high, with a suspended stone staircase up to the attic, with pavilions to the courtyard on stone corbels with undercut timbers and tin shelters, and with two balconies on corbels leading to the street.
A new two-storey building with vaulted cellars and stables on the ground floor and reeded ceilings on the upper floors was built on the previously undeveloped garden plot at the rear. The other new building was a two-storey shed associated with the liquor factory.
In 1842 the palace was inherited by Josephine, Princess of Schwarzenberg. Princess Josephine ran a salon here, the equivalent of social media and unofficial lifelong learning at the time. The salon was always run by a lady and, in addition to musical productions, discussions and polemics on topics of interest or conversation took place there. The salon shaped taste and public opinion, evaluated works of art and philosophical currents, and favored public figures.
Princess Josephine sold the palace for the high price of 100,000 gold pieces to the liqueur manufacturer Gottfried Leonhard from Saxony. Leonhard had the main building converted into a shop, and a liquor store with a jelly factory was built in the courtyard. Rosolka, the liqueur of the Czech revivalists, was one of the most popular Czech liqueurs in the 19th century. The basis of the recipe is the now-protected carnivorous plant, the round-leaved sundew, which is why you can hardly taste real rosolka today.
At the age of fifty-three, the entrepreneur and liqueur producer Gottfried Leonhard married nineteen-year-old Maria Karolina Zlobická and transferred the house at 998 Hybernská Street, today's Kampus Hybernská, to his newlywed wife as a wedding gift. The marriage lasted only seven years and soon after his death Marie married Ferdinand František Fügner, a clerk of the National Bank. Jindřich Fügner, the future founder of Sokol, became her brother-in-law.
In 1861 Marie applied for permission to build a warehouse building on the garden plot, but during the approval she changed the purpose of the building to a gymnasium - the building was intended for the national gymnastic association Sokol, which her brother-in-law founded in 1862. The conspiratorial way of announcing the building was probably justified by fear of police persecution and distrust in the recently proclaimed constitutional freedoms. In the end, the gymnasium did not become a gymnasium because Maria's husband, a link to her brother-in-law and his Czech national ideals, died two months after the building was approved. The premises of the intended gymnasium were apparently later in the 1870s used by the German Turverein gymnastic union.
In 1628, the two houses under No. 998 were legally merged for the first time into a single house, i.e. one house unit, on which tax was levied.
In 1629, the Franciscans from Ireland, known as the Hibernians (Ireland = Hibernia) after their place of origin, came to help with the recatholization of the monastery of St. Joseph with the Church of the Immaculate Conception. On the site of their former monastery buildings and gardens, later barracks, stands today's Palladium on Republic Square. The whole street was later named after the Hibernians. Between 1663 and 1664, the Hibernians and the university in Prague were linked by the personality of Bernardino Sannig, Franciscan vicar general and professor of philosophy at the university.
In the 1870s, the two main buildings at No. 998 were owned by the Desfours-Adienville family. The reconstruction of both medieval houses created a four-winged Baroque palace. The rear wing was turned into a large ornamental tree garden. In 1814, the palace was still a single-storey building, but from the 1830s onwards, construction work on both buildings began in earnest. A habitable attic was created, roofs were reconstructed, new chimneys were built and new canals were created to the street sewer, all in keeping with the rapid development and modernisation of the city.
In 1463, King George of Poděbrady bought the house to accommodate his courtiers and servants who could not fit into the nearby King's Court (today the Municipal House stands on its site). There was also a stable for the royal horses.In the middle of the 16th century on the site of today's Kampus Hybernská stood the Brož (Ambrose) brewery, in the second half of the 16th century called the Diblík brewery after its owners, the Bohemian brothers.
Before 1348, the so-called Mountain Road connected Prague with Kutná Hora in the place of today's Hybernská Street. It was one of the first paved streets in Prague, which is why it was sometimes called “Cobblestone Street” (Dlážděná ulice in Czech). It was the entrance to the city.
In 1348, Charles IV founded the New Town of Prague. Hybernská was planned as a representative street in the direction of Kutná Hora, the second most important medieval city. After the walls were built around the New Town, Hybernská ceased to be a peripheral exit and became an important artery of the New Town with the Mountain Gate on one side and the Powder Gate on the other. On the south side of the street there was already a continuous development of houses of wealthy maltsters and brewers. The Mountain Gate and Dlážděná Street were probably used not only for the mined silver from Kutná Hora, but also by the first students of the newly founded Charles University.
In 1355, Charles IV founded the Church of St. Ambrose in the New Town, after which today's Hybernská Street was also called St. Ambrose Street. Street names used to be a matter of custom for centuries until the codification of street names and the compulsory designation of streets in 1787.
In the 1470s, two medieval townhouses, the foundation of today's seven buildings of Kampus, were built on the site of today's Kampus Hybernská. In 1381, the eastern half of the plot was built over with a brewery house, and the vaulted Gothic cellars remain from this period.
