The story of this place
This baroque Orthodox church on Resslova Street holds one of the most harrowing sites of the resistance. After the Czechoslovak agents Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík mortally wounded Reinhard Heydrich in Operation Anthropoid in May 1942, they and five comrades hid in the church's stone crypt. Betrayed by a fellow parachutist, they were surrounded on 18 June by some 800 SS and police. For six hours the seven men held off the assault; three died fighting in the nave, and the four in the crypt, out of ammunition and with the Germans flooding it with water, took their own lives rather than surrender. Bullet scars still pit the crypt window, now a national memorial.