Bishop's Courtyard
Bisschopshof
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The courtyard garden at the foot of the Dom Tower — This is Flora's Hof, once the courtyard of the bishop's palace of Utrecht. Here the bishops of Utrecht resided, though with many interruptions. When the Dom Tower was built in the fourteenth century, the building of a bishop's residence was commenced in the southwest corner of today's streets Servetstraat, Lichte and Donkere Gaard, Wed and Domplein. The street names Lichte Gaard and Donkere Gaard still recall the gardens - de gaarden, the groves - of the bishop's palace.
The palace consisted of two perpendicular wings with an entrance of three hexagonal towers with a tall spire in the corner. The middle one contained the entrance door, the two others a stair tower to reach the upper floors. The upper floor, with the tall windows, was the main floor. The right wing with the stork's nest on the chimney was located on the Lichte Gaard. The left wing, in the middle of the drawing, was on the street now called the Wed. The low wing partially hidden behind a tree on the left used to overlook the Oudmunster Church on the southern part of Domplein, until the church was demolished in 1587. Later, a garden was created on the vacant land by the occupant. On the far right you can see the passage to the Lichte Gaard, the garden which this street was named after.
The bishop's palace lost its function in 1580 when the last bishop, Frederik Schenk van Toutenburg, died. The Bishop's Court was given various uses. At first, it housed sick orphans for a short while. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the palace was extensively rebuilt to prepare it for the military governor, Count Ernst Casimir of Nassau. On Servetstraat, entrance gate was then built, with the year 1634 and the coat of arms of the province of Utrecht at the top as decoration. This gate still exists. In the eighteenth century, the Bischop's Courtyard was privately occupied. Jan de Beijer drew the privately owned courtyard in 1744. After the death of the last occupant in 1775, the status of the building went downhill. In 1795 it served as barracks for French soldiers, which caused its rapid deterioration. In 1800, it was finally sold for demolition and it was also demolished three years later. Immediately afterwards, Hendrik van Lunteren laid out the Flora's Hof flower farm on the fallow land. Here mainly fruit trees, shrubs and tub plants were grown for country houses. The land at the edges of his property along Wed and Domplein was later sold as building land for residential houses.
Part of Flora's Hof remained until 1934, after which the municipality's Monuments Department used the land as a warehouse. Reliefs of wimbergen were bricked into the east the west wall, which architect Pierre Cuypers had commissioned for the Cathedral in 1893 and which were removed during the 1960 restoration. In 2008, on private initiative, what was left of Flora's Hof was recreated in a garden style inspired by the nineteenth century. This is what you can still see and visit today.
