Doubling Up

OLOMOUC has many churches and, unusually for a non-capital city, two cathedrals.

The well-known one is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saint Wenceslas, but Olomouc also has the Eastern Orthodox Cathedral of Saint Gorazd.

The Church of Saint Gorazd was consecrated in 1939 and became a cathedral in 1950

Gorazd was a prominent follower of the Byzantine brothers Cyril* and Methodius, who preached to and converted many Slavs in the 800s.

In 1921, when the Roman Catholic priest Matěj Pavlík converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, he was made Bishop of Moravia and Silesia with the new name of Gorazd.

Bishop Gorazd was executed in 1942 after a group of British-trained Czechs and Slovaks, who had assassinated leading Nazi Reinhard Heydrich, were found hiding in the crypt of Prague Cathedral.

The bishop, although he had only learnt of the resistance fighters' presence days after they arrived, accepted full responsibility, and was tortured for his pains before being shot.

In 1961 the Serbian Orthodox Church declared Bishop Gorazd a New Martyr, a title mainly given to those killed since Pagan Roman times by non-Orthodox Christians, Muslims and Communists.

In 1987, at St Gorazd's Cathedral in Olomouc, Bishop Gorazd was declared a saint.

*Cyrillic script is named after him.