Prague Astronomical Clock

Every hour, a skeleton pulls a rope, twelve apostles parade past two tiny windows, a rooster crows, and hundreds of tourists crane their necks upward in unison. The Prague Astronomical Clock — the Orloj — has been performing this macabre little show since 1410, making it the oldest astronomical clock still in operation anywhere in the world.

The clock was built by clockmaker Mikulás of Kadan and mathematician Jan Sindel, though legend tells a darker story. According to Prague folklore, the city councillors had the clockmaker blinded so he could never build anything to rival it. Driven mad, he supposedly reached into the mechanism and sabotaged it, cursing the clock and the city. The blinding story is almost certainly myth, but it's been repeated for six centuries because Prague loves a good curse.

What most people miss while watching the apostles is the clock face itself, which is genuinely extraordinary. It tracks Old Czech Time, Central European Time, the position of the sun and moon, the zodiac, and the current phase of the moon — all on a single medieval dial. The outer ring even shows the months and their corresponding agricultural activities, painted by Josef Manes in 1865.

The clock nearly died in May 1945, when German forces set fire to the Old Town Hall during the Prague Uprising. The wooden apostle figures and the calendar dial were badly damaged. The restoration took years, but the Orloj came back. Its most recent overhaul ran from January to September 2018, when the 1948 electric mechanism was swapped for an original 1860s mechanism — a deliberate step backward in time.