Brno Audio Tours

In the 1850s, an Augustinian monk named Gregor Mendel was growing peas in the garden of St Thomas's Abbey in Brno. He crossbred roughly 29,000 plants over seven years and documented patterns in how traits were inherited, laying the foundations of modern genetics. His results were published in 1866, ignored for thirty-five years, and then recognised retrospectively as one of the most important scientific contributions of the nineteenth century. The abbey is still there, on Mendlovo namesti, and the garden still exists. Mendel's work happened in a city that was then called Brunn and was the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Moravia, a fact that the Czech Republic now rightfully claims.

Brno is the second city of the Czech Republic and operates comfortably in that position: large enough to have everything, small enough to move through without exhaustion.

Spilberk Castle on the hill above the old town was a medieval fortress that the Habsburgs converted into one of Europe's most feared political prisons in the seventeenth century, then Napoleon's troops dismantled in 1809 after the Battle of Austerlitz was fought thirty kilometres to the east. The Villa Tugendhat, commissioned in 1928 and completed in 1930 to a design by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, is on the UNESCO World Heritage List and is one of the finest examples of modernist residential architecture in Europe. It stands in a garden overlooking the city on a slope that Mies used to justify his structural philosophy.