Stone from India

The restoration of the Marian Column on Old Town Square was not only a matter of craftsmanship and historical fidelity. It was also a journey to find a stone that could replace the original monumental sandstone shaft. There is no open sandstone quarry in Bohemia where it would be possible to extract such a large solid block as the column required. This fact marked the beginning of a long and adventurous search for suitable material around the world.

The first idea was to look to Africa. The sandstones there seemed promising, but after a detailed examination of the samples, it became clear that their structure and composition did not correspond to the Czech Božanov sandstone from which the original column had been made. The search then continued in Australia, where stone of similar colour and roughness is quarried. It was even possible to find a place where a block of unusually large dimensions could be extracted. However, hope faded after frost tests: Australian sandstone would not withstand the Czech climate. And so the third round of the search began.

Coincidentally, and thanks to a chain of contacts, a quarry was discovered in India, in the Jaipur region. It was there that a six-meter block of sandstone was finally extracted, meeting all the requirements: strength, structure, color, and frost resistance. Thus began its long journey to Prague. The block was loaded onto a ship, transported across the ocean and through European ports, and even completed part of its journey on the theater ship Tajemství. On its deck, the stone carvers continued to work as if it were a floating workshop.

However, the restoration was not only a technical matter. Czech cities and compatriots from the USA and Canada, who donated 24 foundation stones, also took part. The Italian town of Vitorchiano, famous for its sandstone quarries, donated the stone for the plinth. Four orders of chivalry (Knights of Malta, Teutonic Knights, Red Star Crusaders, and St. Lazarus of Jerusalem) provided the stones for the four angel pedestals around the base of the column. This element gave the restoration a strong community dimension: the column became the work not only of experts, but also of people who wanted to contribute to the return of the monument through their participation.

While permits and political decisions were still being debated, the individual parts of the column were already being made. In order to be ready for the moment when construction could begin, they were stored in a secret location in the casemates of the fortress at Jaroměř–Josefov. Meanwhile, work on the shaft of the column continued on Petřín, and the statue of the Virgin Mary waited by Týn Church. Thus, the restoration proceeded patiently, with the knowledge that one day the moment would come when all the parts would be joined into one whole.

When the column was finally restored in 2020, it was not just the return of a Baroque landmark. It was also a story about the search for stone on three continents, about the work of stonemasons on a ship, about the gifts of cities and towns, and about patience and perseverance. Today, the Marian Column stands not only as a historical reconstruction, but also as testimony to the fact that great things are created when expertise, faith, determination and human cooperation come together.

And in this broader story of faith, which transcends individual human lives, there is also room for another fateful story of two people who never spoke to one another and yet together impressed one of its symbols upon Europe. When a competition was announced after the war for the design of the European flag, the French official Arsène Heitz entered it with a proposal that did not arise from political considerations, but from his deep Marian devotion. Paul M. G. Lévy, who survived persecution and the horrors of the Holocaust during the Second World War, then built on this proposal, had it graphically refined into a circle of twelve stars, and pushed it through in the Council of Europe.

The motif of twelve stars, traditionally understood as a sign of the fullness of God's people, was thus carried over onto the flag, which was coincidentally adopted on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. At the time, European institutions interpreted this motif exclusively as an expression of harmony and unity, because they had no information about Heitz's Marian inspiration. Heitz himself publicly described his true motives only many years later, when the flag had already become a generally accepted symbol of European identity.