Two Legends of the Loreta

For more than three centuries, time in this former outskirts of Prague has been measured by the bells hung in the slender onion-domed tower of Prague’s Loreto, known there just as ‘The Loreta’. However its architectural and spiritual core is not this picturesque belfry but the Holy House set in its courtyard, in a complex of galleries, arcades and chapels. Loretos, some of the best known places of pilgrimage in the Christian world, were smallish houses constructed as exact replicas of the “Holy House” (Santa Casa) in the Italian town of Loreto. It was believed that this was the house in which the Holy family had lived in Nazareth and where the Archangel Gabriel had foretold the birth of Jesus to the Virgin Mary…