Prague: Clocks, Castles & the Bohemian Soul

The Týn Church, whose construction began in thirteen sixty-five, dominates the eastern side of the square with a silhouette that looks borrowed from a medieval manuscript. For nearly two centuries it was the main church of the Utraquist movement — early Czech reformers who demanded that laypeople receive both bread and wine at communion, a radical idea that put them at odds with Rome a full century before Luther nailed his theses to the door in Wittenberg. After the Battle of White Mountain, the church was handed back to the Catholics, and the golden chalice that symbolised the Hussites was melted down to make the Madonna above the entrance.

Near the centre of the square stands the Jan Hus memorial, unveiled in nineteen fifteen on the five hundredth anniversary of his death. Hus was a Czech theologian and rector of Charles University who preached religious reform in this city a century before the Reformation and was burned at the stake in Constance in fourteen fifteen for his troubles. The Czech national identity has been bound up with his memory ever since. In January nineteen sixty-nine, a student named Jan Palach burned himself alive near this memorial to protest the Soviet occupation following the crushing of the Prague Spring the previous August. The square carries all of this — the medieval market, the executions, the martyrdoms, the resistance — under its cheerful baroque surface.

At Christmas and Easter the square fills with markets that are among the best in Europe: wooden stalls selling trdelník and svařené víno, the smell of mulled wine drifting across the cobblestones, the Týn Church lit from below. Prague knows how to wear its history lightly when it wants to. The Astronomical Clock tower is just to your left. That is your next stop, and you should be there in time for the hour.

At the top of every hour, something moves. Two windows above the clock face open, and the twelve Apostles process past in wooden figures, each holding their symbol — Peter with his key, Paul with his sword, John with his chalice. As they move, four allegorical figures flanking the clock sway: Vanity admires itself in a mirror, the Miser clutches his money bag, the Turk (representing Lust) shakes his head, and Death — a skeleton — rings a bell and turns its hourglass. A golden rooster crows, the windows close, and the clock strikes.

The legend attached to the clock is Prague at its most operatic. When the clock was completed, the city council was so determined that nothing like it should exist anywhere else that they had the clockmaker, a man named Hanuš, blinded so he could never build another. Whether this is true is debatable — the historical record is murky — but what the legend adds is this: Hanuš, blinded and furious, was led to the clock one last time. He reached into the mechanism and stopped it. The clock did not work again for over a century.

The clock was damaged during the Prague Uprising of nineteen forty-five, when German forces set fire to the Old Town Hall. The figures were burned, the mechanism damaged. It was restored and restarted in nineteen forty-eight. For a machine that has been stopped by a blinded craftsman, burned by retreating Nazis, and restarted under a Communist government, it keeps remarkably good time. When the hour strikes, watch Death ring the bell. It has been doing this for more than six hundred years.

The thirty baroque statues were not part of the original design. The bridge stood bare for three centuries. Then, starting in sixteen eighty-three, the Catholic Church began populating it with saints as a counterpoint to the Hussite tradition — a kind of open-air gallery of Counter-Reformation devotion. The oldest and most famous is the bronze statue of St. John of Nepomuk, a fourteenth-century vicar general who was thrown into the Vltava from this bridge on the orders of King Wenceslas IV in thirteen ninety-three — supposedly for refusing to reveal what Queen Sophia had confessed to him. He was made a saint in seventeen twenty-nine, and rubbing the bronze plaque at the base of his statue is said to bring good luck and ensure your return to Prague. The plaque is worn gold-bright by millions of hands.

Look in the road on the bridge and you will find a small cross and five brass stars marking the spot where Nepomuk's body was thrown over the railing. Stand on the cross and make a wish. Prague takes its superstitions seriously. The view from the bridge is the one you came for: west toward the castle rising above Malá Strana, its towers catching whatever light the Bohemian sky is offering; east back across the Old Town rooftops toward the Týn spires. Street musicians play here in all weather. Portrait artists set up easels. If the padlocks are gone — the city periodically removes them — the railings have already been restocked.

The bridge was the only crossing of the Vltava in Prague for over four centuries. Everything that came in and out of the city crossed here: armies, merchants, religious processions, royal funerals. Walk slowly. This is one of those surfaces that rewards attention.

The signature building of Malá Strana is the Church of St. Nicholas, which fills the main square — Malostranské náměstí — with a green dome and bell tower of such confident size that it can be seen from half of Prague. The church was built by the Jesuits between sixteen seventy-three and seventeen fifty-five and is considered the finest example of High Baroque architecture in Bohemia. The interior is overwhelming: frescoed vaults, gilded altars, a pipe organ that Mozart played in seventeen eighty-seven, and a chandelier made from Bohemian crystal that weighs over a tonne. It is a building designed to argue that God is magnificent and the Jesuits are his appropriate representatives.

Walk through the backstreets here and you will find cobblestones worn smooth by centuries of foot traffic, ivy-covered walls in various states of deliberate dishevelment, and restaurants where svíčková — beef in cream sauce with bread dumplings — has been served to the same neighbourhood for generations. The trams navigate these streets with a confidence that seems to defy the geometry involved. Malá Strana is the Prague of the imagination: dark, beautiful, slightly melancholy, smelling faintly of good cooking and old stone.

One more thing about this neighbourhood that rewards slow walking: the garden walls. Behind the baroque facades on almost every street are hidden gardens — the Vrtba Garden, the Wallenstein Garden, the Ledeburg Garden — palaces of greenery on terraced hillsides that open to the public and feel like secrets even when they are technically on the map. The Wallenstein Garden was built by Albrecht von Wallenstein, the general who became the most powerful military commander of the Thirty Years' War before being assassinated by his own side in sixteen thirty-four. His garden is full of bronze copies of Roman statues, the originals having been carried off to Sweden during the war, which is the kind of Prague story that rewards you for reading the small print.

The castle is above you. The climb is steep in places. Follow the lane uphill — Nerudova Street, lined with baroque townhouses decorated with emblems that served as street addresses before numbering was introduced, a golden chalice above one doorway, a pair of suns above another. There is a tram that goes up the hill if your legs require it. But the walk is better.

After the Habsburgs came centuries of gradual decline, occupation, and revival. The castle has been under Czech government control since nineteen eighteen, when Czechoslovakia declared independence following the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The president of the Czech Republic lives and works here, making it among the most historically continuous seats of government in Europe — a thousand years of unbroken occupation by whoever held power in Bohemia.

The changing of the guard happens on the hour at the main gate and is worth catching: a ceremony of modest but genuine dignity compared to the theatrical productions at Buckingham Palace. From the castle's eastern terrace, Prague spreads below you in every direction — red-tile rooftops, the river, the bridges, the dome of St. Nicholas, the spires of the Týn Church in the distance. It is the view that proves the city is exactly as beautiful as advertised.

The changing of the guard happens on the hour at the main gate and is worth catching: a ceremony of modest but genuine dignity compared to the theatrical productions at Buckingham Palace. From the castle's eastern terrace, Prague spreads below you in every direction — red-tile rooftops, the river, the bridges, the dome of St. Nicholas, the spires of the Týn Church in the distance. It is the view that proves the city is exactly as beautiful as advertised.

The most culturally significant tenant of this castle in modern times: Václav Havel lived here. The dissident playwright and essayist who spent years under Communist surveillance — his post was opened, his phone tapped, his every movement observed — and served time in prison for writing letters to the government that pointed out its contradictions. When the Velvet Revolution succeeded in November nineteen eighty-nine, Havel was elected president within weeks. He moved into this castle, put on a bicycle, and rode through the corridors. He was the kind of president who said things like "the truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred" without irony, and his country believed him. He held the office until two thousand and three, brought the country into NATO and the European Union, and remained in the castle you are standing in until his death in twenty eleven. The castle has housed kings, emperors, and presidents for eleven hundred years. Not all of them earned the place.

The stained-glass windows are extraordinary, but the one to find is the rose window above the western entrance, designed by Alfons Mucha in nineteen thirty-one. Mucha is known for his Art Nouveau posters of languorous women surrounded by flowers, but this window is something different — a dense, jewelled narrative of the stories of Cyril and Methodius, the ninth-century missionaries who brought Christianity to the Slavic peoples. It glows blue and gold and amber in morning light.

The centrepiece of the interior is the Chapel of St. Wenceslas, encrusted with semi-precious stones and fourteenth-century frescoes showing scenes from the saint's life and Passion. Wenceslas — the Good King Wenceslas of the Christmas carol — was Duke of Bohemia and was murdered in nine thirty-five by his brother Boleslav, almost certainly for political rather than religious reasons, though the Church canonised him as a martyr. He is the patron saint of Bohemia, and his bones lie in the silver reliquary inside this chapel.

The Bohemian Crown Jewels — the Crown of St. Wenceslas, the royal sceptre, the royal orb, the coronation robe, and the gold reliquary cross — are locked in a chamber directly above the chapel behind seven separate locks. Seven keys, held by seven different officials: the president of the Republic, the prime minister, the archbishop of Prague, the chairman of the Senate, the chairman of the Chamber of Deputies, the mayor of Prague, and the dean of the St. Vitus Cathedral chapter. All seven must be present simultaneously to open the chamber. The jewels are exhibited to the public only on exceptional national occasions — coronations, major anniversaries, moments when the Czech state wants to show the nation what it is made of. The last display was in two thousand and eighteen for the centenary of Czechoslovak independence. The crown itself dates to thirteen forty-six. A legend says that whoever places it on their head without being the rightful ruler of Bohemia will die within a year. Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, reportedly tried on the crown in nineteen forty-one. He was assassinated by Czech paratroopers in Prague nine months later.

Franz Kafka lived in house number twenty-two from November nineteen sixteen to May nineteen seventeen. His sister Ottla rented the house, and he used it as a writing space, walking up from the city in the evenings and sitting in this tiny room in the cold Bohemian winter to work on the stories collected in 'A Country Doctor.' The stories he wrote here — including 'The Knock at the Gate' and 'A Dream' — have the compressed, airless quality of a man writing in a room so small he can touch both walls simultaneously. The castle as Kafka's setting is not metaphorical; he was literally in it.

The houses are now shops and small museums. The toy-shop atmosphere is deliberate and somewhat at odds with the genuinely strange history of the place. House number twelve sells medieval weapons; house number fourteen sells herbal remedies; somewhere in between, a room full of armour sits under a ceiling that would not have looked out of place in a gnome's workshop. The miniaturisation is part of the point. Everything in the Golden Lane is at a scale that makes the castle — one of the most powerful political complexes in European history — feel suddenly domestic, human-sized, slightly absurd. Kafka would have appreciated that.

His sister Ottla rented number twenty-two to give him somewhere to work undisturbed by the noise and demands of the family apartment in the Old Town. He came here most evenings through the winter of nineteen sixteen to seventeen, walking up from the city in the cold. He described the lane in his diary in terms that mix practicality with the particular low-grade dread he brought to most descriptions of enclosed spaces. The stories he produced here are not his most famous, but they are among his most precisely strange.

At the upper end of the lane, stairs lead up to the ramparts walk, where you can see the castle wall from above and look out over the rooftops of Malá Strana below. The walk connects to the castle's defence towers, including the White Tower and Daliborka — a fifteenth-century prison where the first prisoner, a nobleman named Dalibor, allegedly learned to play the violin while awaiting execution, becoming so accomplished that citizens of Prague stood outside the tower walls to listen. Janáček wrote an opera about him. In Prague, even the prisons have their own opera.

The most famous story of the ghetto is the Golem. Rabbi Loew — the Maharal of Prague, the greatest Jewish scholar of the sixteenth century — is said to have created a golem: a figure of clay animated by a piece of parchment with the word 'emet' (truth) placed in its mouth, made to protect the Jewish community from pogroms. When the Sabbath came, the Maharal removed the parchment, and the golem became clay again. Legend says the golem's body still rests in the attic of the Old New Synagogue — Staronová synagoga — which was built around twelve seventy and is the oldest active synagogue in Europe, its early Gothic vaulting still intact after seven and a half centuries.

The reason Josefov survived the Second World War is documented and chilling. The Nazis preserved the ghetto's six synagogues and the cemetery with the intention of creating a museum to an extinct race once they had completed the extermination of European Jewry. They collected Torah scrolls, ritual objects, and documentation from Jewish communities across Bohemia and Moravia and stored them here. The destruction they planned never happened, and the objects they collected for a museum of extinction became instead a museum of survival. Walk through the Pinkas Synagogue and you will find the names of seventy-seven thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven Czech and Moravian Jewish victims of the Holocaust written directly on the walls.

This square has been the stage for the most consequential moments in modern Czech history. In August nineteen sixty-eight, Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring — Alexander Dubček's attempt to build socialism with a human face. Protesters stood in front of tanks here. On January sixteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, a twenty-year-old philosophy student named Jan Palach set himself on fire at the foot of the Wenceslas statue to protest the occupation and the collaboration of those who had given up the resistance. He died three days later. A memorial marks the spot.

This square has been the stage for the most consequential moments in modern Czech history. In August nineteen sixty-eight, Soviet and Warsaw Pact tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring — Alexander Dubček's attempt to build socialism with a human face. Protesters stood in front of tanks here. On January sixteenth, nineteen sixty-nine, a twenty-year-old philosophy student named Jan Palach set himself on fire at the foot of the Wenceslas statue to protest the occupation and the collaboration of those who had given up the resistance. He died three days later. A memorial marks the spot.

On November seventeenth, nineteen eighty-nine, student demonstrators marched from the university district toward the Old Town. Police cornered them on Národní Street, a few blocks from here, and beat them. The news spread through the city over the following hours. Within days, hundreds of thousands of people were gathering in this square and in Letná Park on the hill above the city. Václav Havel — playwright, dissident, still technically a private citizen — became the organiser and the symbol of what was happening.

On November twenty-fourth, Alexander Dubček appeared on the balcony of the Melantrich publishing house, number thirty-six on this boulevard, alongside Havel. The crowd below understood that something irreversible was happening. Keys jingled across the square — hundreds of thousands of key rings being shaken, the sound that became the sound of the revolution, the sound of a door being unlocked. By the twenty-ninth of December, Václav Havel had been elected president of Czechoslovakia by unanimous vote of the Federal Assembly. The Velvet Revolution — velvet because it was essentially bloodless — had lasted forty-one days from the first march to the new government. You are standing in the square where it happened, and the man on the horse above you has been watching this boulevard for over a hundred years.

By the eleventh century, Vyšehrad was a royal seat with its own castle, chapter church, and mint. When the Přemyslids moved the court to Prague Castle, Vyšehrad lost political primacy but retained ceremonial importance. The coronation route of Bohemian kings began here. The most intact surviving structure is the Rotunda of St. Martin — a small circular Romanesque chapel built in the late eleventh century that is the oldest intact building in Prague. It survived everything: the Hussite Wars, the Habsburg era, two world wars, and the decades of Communist rule during which the whole of Vyšehrad was somewhat neglected.

The national cemetery here is called Slavín — the glory — and it contains the graves of the people Czechs have decided most deserve to be remembered. Antonín Dvořák is buried here. Bedřich Smetana, whose tone poem 'Má vlast' is the musical equivalent of standing on this cliff. Alphonse Mucha, whose work you may have seen in the cathedral. Karel Čapek, the playwright who invented the word robot in nineteen twenty and died in nineteen thirty-eight, ten days after learning that Britain and France had handed Czechoslovakia to Hitler at Munich. He was spared the occupation by nine days.

From the ramparts, look north. You can see Charles Bridge, the Old Town towers, the castle, the dome of St. Nicholas, the Týn spires. Everything you have walked today is visible from here. Prague holds itself together remarkably well as a city seen from a distance. It is dense and coherent and beautiful, and it has survived things that would have erased a lesser place. That it is still here, still this intact, still producing good beer and great music and extremely complicated history, is something approaching a miracle. Dobrou cestu — safe travels.