History

 The Schebek Palace has a long history dating back to the times of King Charles IV in the 14th Century. At the time, it was the first and only building on the street. The original palace was built for Kristof of Wallenstein, and later given to another nobleman for his valor during the Prussian Army’s siege of Prague. After a 1757 fire, the grounds functioned as a convent-hospital, and later an orphanage and free-masons lodge. 

The palace as we see it today was built in the mid-19th Century, when a famous entrepreneur and railroad builder, Baron Jan Schebek, commissioned the construction of a magnificent palace made of sandstone and marble. The architect intended to design a small-scale replica of the Versailles Palace. A marble staircase leads up to the former public rooms of the palace, where you will find antique furniture, parquet floors and extravagant rugs, fabric walls, bejeweled ceilings, chandeliers, and frescoes. Painted ceilings depict scenes from Olympus, symbols representing the Arts and Sciences, and signs of the Zodiac. Stunning paintings of the ‘Ten Lucents’ adorn the main ballroom.

In 1890, the palace was sold to the Austro-Hungarian bank (and later transferred to the State Bank of Czechoslovakia). In 1963, the building was transferred to the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, as the seat of its Institute of Economics. Today, CERGE-EI proudly calls the palace home.