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Wooden angel will once again adorn Czech church

On 14 March 1994, inhabitants of the Czech village of Kozojedy discovered that an angel figure was missing from the 18th-century altar of the baroque Chapel of St. Wenceslas, which the figure had adorned for hundreds of years.

A wooden female figure with wavy hair raises her arms above her head against a light blue background, on which rests a cloud-like structure. The wooden angel that was returned to the Czech Republic Source: State Bureau of Criminal Investigation of Bavaria

Some 23 years later, a sculpture of an angel for sale in Germany was found to be strikingly similar to the missing angel. The relevant public prosecutor’s office seized the sculpture and confirmed through expert analysis that it was the original work stolen from the Czech Republic.

The Czech Ministry of Culture then filed an official request for return with Germany’s Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.

Thanks to close cooperation between the Czech and German authorities, as well as willingness to cooperate on the part of the figure’s then owner, it was handed over to two representatives of the Czech Ministry of Culture and one representative of the Catholic Church in June 2021.

Two representatives of the Bavarian State Office of Criminal Investigation and a representative of the Czech Republic stand in a light-flooded corridor next to a partition wall, in front of which a large wooden figure is displayed on a table. Delegation at the handover ceremony at the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office in Munich. Source: State Bureau of Criminal Investigation of Bavaria