A stone altar and a wooden cross at the chapel in Nepomuky

A stone altar and a wooden cross are being built at the Chapel of St John of Nepomuk in Nepomuky na Moravě, a hamlet of Stará Říše in the Jihlava District, on the Vysočina upland of western Moravia.

The chapel is why the village exists. In the eighteenth century the owners of the Brtnice estate founded a new settlement beside a shrine to St John of Nepomuk, on the site of the abandoned village of Veselí. The first written mention of Nepomuky is from 1756. The name of the place comes from the chapel, not the other way around.

The chapel

The Diocese of Brno records the building as Nepomuky na Moravě, kaple sv. Jana Nepomuckého. It stands by the road toward Nevcehle, at the turning of a forest track. The first chapel went up around 1756; it was rebuilt in 1859. It belongs to the Roman Catholic parish of Stará Říše. The administrator excurrendo is P. Mgr. Bc. Petr Pavel Severin, OPraem.

There are no regular services. Once a year, in May, a pilgrimage Mass for the feast of St John of Nepomuk is celebrated here. Processions come from Stará Říše; the principal celebrant is usually the abbot of the Premonstratensians at Nová Říše.

Beside the chapel grows a monumental lime, 26 metres tall. In 2009 its age was put at about 150 years.

The cadastral territory is Nepomuky na Moravě (code 753882), 7.64 km², at about 670 m above sea level, above the Vápovka stream and under Veselský vrch (712 m). In the 2021 census the hamlet had three inhabitants and fourteen houses.

What is being added

The new work is modest and fits the scale of the shrine: a stone altar for the chapel and a wooden cross beside it.

The altar gives the 1859 rebuilding a proper mensa for the rare Masses that are still said here. Stone is the right material for an exposed upland chapel — it will take weather that timber furniture would not. The wooden cross stands with the lime tree at the edge of the settlement, the older mark of a Moravian hamlet: chapel, tree, cross.

St John of Nepomuk is usually shown with a cross in his hand and five stars around his head. A cross at the chapel that carries his name is not decoration. It is the attribute of the saint on whose shrine the village was founded.

In the same landscape

The chapel remains a wayside shrine on the road to Nevcehle, not a parish church. The new altar and cross are meant for that use: a place to stop, and a table for the May pilgrimage Mass.