The court in Kroměříž will begin to address the dispute over the Květná Garden

Kroměříž - The Kroměříž District Court will today begin to deal with the dispute over the ownership of the Květná 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 during restitution proceedings. The Archdiocese of Olomouc therefore filed a lawsuit in this matter last June.

The Archdiocese is convinced that the garden forms a whole with the Kroměříž Palace and the Podzámecká Garden, which were returned to the church during restitution proceedings. The NPÚ previously announced that it did not return the garden due to doubts about the fulfillment of legal conditions for restitution. The first hearing in the case at the court in Kroměříž was originally scheduled for last November, but was canceled at the last minute. The Archdiocese requested that a court other than the Kroměříž court decide the case, which was subsequently rejected by the Regional Court in Brno.

In 2015, the state returned the Kroměříž Palace and the Podzámecká Garden to the church as part of a property settlement. However, it refused to return the Květná Garden because its historical area is intertwined with new constructions, which, according to the NPÚ, cannot be separated and therefore cannot be returned under the restitution law. In the Květná Garden, work costing 230 million crowns was completed in 2014, which restored about a third of it to its 17th-century appearance.

The Kroměříž Květná Garden is also known by the name Libosad. Today it is the only representative of such a composed whole in Europe. The garden was commissioned by the Bishop of Olomouc, Karel from Liechtenstein-Kastelkorn, in the second half of the 17th century.