Vojanovy sady / Vojan's Garden (Prague) - Municipal Parks and Plazas on Waymarking.com

Vojanovy sady (Vojan's Garden), the oldest preserved garden in Prague (firstly mentioned in 1248), is hidden behind walls and houses in the Lesser Town district and offers very intimate atmosphere of old monastery gardens.

The Garden was given its current name as late as in 1954, when it was opened to the public and named after Czech actor Eduard Vojan. Even though the other part of its name says a "park" the place retained its original intimate character. Originally it was part of a fruit garden owned by the Bishop residence which was founded in the 13th century in Lesser Town.

In 1661, one part of the area was bought by Emperor Ferdinand III., who founded a monastery on it which became home to female members of Carmelite order and it was the nuns who stamped their idea of modesty into the overall ambience of the garden.

In the 17th century, the arcade wall with alcoves was built between the monastery and the garden. Roughly from around the same time comes the St. Elias Chapel that was designed as a stalagmite cave, something that was very modern in the Baroque time. Chapel of St. Teresa of Avila was added a few dozen years later.

Since 1783 the garden had been maintained by the "Rád anglických panen" (Order of English Virgins) before it was transferred into the hands of the Finance Ministry in 1920. In the same year, the southern part of the garden was partially built up and the northern was adapted into a somewhat historical landscape style.

The garden has probably retained a slightly melancholic echo from its long gone inception in the somewhat sombre middle ages when it was founded as a monastic garden. It was designed to have a formal and strictly geometric layout, an aspect that time has hardly interfered with, except for a few light touches in the style in some parts of the garden in the 1920s.