Mohyla míru
Monument · Czechia
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Mohyla míru is Europe's first peace memorial, built 1910–12 by Josef Fanta to honour fallen in the Battle of Austerlitz. The 26m square monument contains four female statues representing France, Austria, Russia and Moravia, plus a chapel with ossuary; an adjacent museum branch offers multimedia exhibitions.
The monument's origin lies with Alois Slovák, a Brno priest and secondary-school teacher who spent years walking the old battlefield and grew troubled that the thousands who died here in 1805 rested in graves that had simply vanished from memory. His campaign for a monument that honoured no side's victory, only the fallen of every army, took over a decade to reach a foundation stone. Construction ran from 1910 to 1912, built by Otakar Nekvasil to Josef Fanta's design, its stone mass raised in the shape of an ancient Slavic burial mound. The First World War delayed the planned 1914 opening by nearly a decade; the monument and its chapel were finally consecrated in 1923. Beneath the chapel floor lies an ossuary holding remains that were still being gathered from the battlefield as the building went up. Every year around the anniversary of the battle in early December, the memorial holds a solemn ceremony for the dead of all three armies.
What you see
A stepped stone pyramid tapers up to a globe crowned by a ten-metre copper cross, with the farmland of the old battlefield spreading out below the hill.
Practical
The chapel and the adjoining Museum of Brno galleries share the same hours: Tuesday to Sunday 9:00-16:30 from September to May, daily 9:00-18:00 in June-August, admission charged, with a café and gift shop on site. The signed Napoleon cycling route climbs over the summit, its steepest stretch a two-hundred-metre rise at around eight degrees just below the top.
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