Pilgrimages to a Miraculous Picture

In Skočice near Vodňany, the Church of the Visitation keeps a picture of Our Lady of Help, visited by pilgrims on the first Sunday in July. It is a variant or copy of the early-seventeenth-century Madonna of Passau. After 1662, Polyxena Ludmila Švihovská of Žďár moved to Skočice and brought the picture from Nalžovy, where Swedish soldiers had pierced it. She kept it in a château room because there was no chapel. In 1672 the little château burned down completely, but the picture supposedly remained undamaged. The countess built it a small chapel, and when people began making pilgrimages, she erected the present church in 1678. The altar's side panels record miracles that occurred here through the Virgin Mary's intercession.