The Brno Astronomical Clock

On the east side of Freedom Square, since 2010, stands a giant (5.8 m high and 1.7 m wide) stone sculpture designed to remind citizens of the unsuccessful siege of Brno by the Swedes during the Thirty Years' War. The sculpture is black, a work of art of the sculptors Oldřich Rujbr and Petr Kameník. This remarkable structure conceals a clock associated with a complex mechanism that, each day at 11 am (Brno's noon) plays a melody, while one of the four holes in the sculpture opens and reveals a glass ball which you can catch and keep.

The work is officially entitled the Brno astronomical clock, but a more accurate name should simply be a clock. The device actually shows the time (albeit in a rather complicated manner) whose accuracy is guaranteed by a remote transmission from a clock in Frankfurt. Its shape, however, has given rise to all sorts of ideas, and the sculpture soon gained a number of colorful nicknames by the Brno townsfolk…


Brno

Brno - pocket guide with maps

Brno on the map

The unusual shape of the Astronomical Clock aroused initial distrust among the good people of Brno