Brno hides its history underground and out of town: a friary crypt where air currents mummified 18th-century monks, Europe's second-largest ossuary, Napoleon's 1805 battlefield 20 km east, and a fallout bunker under Denis Gardens.
Air currents through the 1650s friary vault mummified 24 friars and around 150 benefactors, laid on bare earth without coffins. Baron Trenck, the Pandur commander who died a prisoner in 1749, lies in a glass case.
Found in 2001 under Jakubské náměstí, this vault holds the bones of roughly 50,000 plague, cholera and war dead cleared from the parish graveyard between 1600 and 1784 — Europe's second largest after Paris.
The Minorites settled here in 1230. Behind the Baroque facade sits a 1720s replica of the Holy House of Loreto and the Holy Stairs — 28 steps that pilgrims still climb on their knees, lined with painted Passion scenes.
The only surviving gate of Brno's medieval wall, built in the 13th century and buried in a tenement until 1976. Its rooms now hold the Brno City Museum's display on the fortifications that stopped the Swedes in 1645.
Mies van der Rohe's 1930 house for the Tugendhat family, UNESCO-listed in 2001. Its onyx wall, retractable windows and chrome columns were state of the art; in 1992 the split of Czechoslovakia was negotiated in its living room.
The Gestapo turned this 1920s student dormitory into a prison in 1940. Around 35,000 people passed through it and over 1,200 were executed in the courtyard, most during the martial law of 1941-42. Plaques mark the wall.
On the Pratzen Heights that Napoleon seized on 2 December 1805, this 1910 Art Nouveau mound was Europe's first peace memorial. The museum below covers the Battle of the Three Emperors and the 16,000 Allied casualties.
Brno's first public park, opened 1818 on the old bastion below Petrov. Its granite obelisk was raised in 1818 to mark the end of the Napoleonic wars — the same conflict whose decisive battle you stood on this afternoon.
Gregor Mendel bred 28,000 pea plants in this abbey garden between 1856 and 1863 and read his results to the Brno Natural Science Society in 1865. The museum holds his microscope, beehives and original 1866 paper.
Built 1936 in functionalist style, this is the only Brno synagogue to survive the Nazi occupation — the Great and Neological synagogues were burned in 1939. The medieval Jewish quarter lay around Masarykova and Josefská.
Dug into the hill under Denis Gardens in 1941 as a Nazi air-raid shelter, never finished, then converted in the 1950s into a Cold War fallout shelter for 500 people. Filtration gear, decontamination rooms and bunks survive.
Brno's wool mills made it the Habsburg Empire's textile capital from the 1760s; Cejl was the workers' quarter. After 1945 it was resettled by Roma families, and the Museum of Romani Culture on Bratislavská tells that story.