The court will begin to address the dispute over the ownership of the Květná Garden

Kroměříž - The District Court in Kroměříž will today begin addressing the dispute over the ownership of the Flower Garden in Kroměříž, which is managed by the National Heritage Institute (NPÚ). The state refused to return the garden, listed on the prestigious UNESCO World Heritage list, to the church as part of restitution. The Archdiocese of Olomouc therefore filed a lawsuit in the matter.

The Archdiocese is convinced that the garden forms a whole with the Kroměříž Castle and the Podzámecká Garden, which it recovered during church restitutions. The NPÚ previously announced that it did not return the garden due to doubts regarding the fulfillment of legal conditions for its restitution.

The first hearing in the case at the Kroměříž court was originally scheduled for November 2017 but was canceled. The Archdiocese requested that a different court than the Kroměříž court decide the matter, which, however, was rejected by the Regional Court in Brno. The Archdiocese was also unsuccessful in appealing to the Supreme Court. At the end of last year, the Regional Court dismissed as unfounded the objection from the Archdiocese regarding the alleged bias of District Court judge Jana Ivánková.

The state returned Kroměříž Castle and the Podzámecká Garden to the church as part of a property settlement in 2015. It refused to return the Flower Garden because the historic site is intertwined with new constructions, which the NPÚ states cannot be separated and therefore cannot be returned under the restitution law. Five years ago, work costing 230 million crowns was completed in the Flower Garden. As a result, about a third of the garden was restored to its 17th-century form, when it was established by Olomouc Bishop Karl of Lichtenstein-Kastelkornu.