🏰 A History of Prague

Prague is a city where politics was settled twice by throwing officials out of windows, where an emperor kept lions in the castle grounds while searching for the philosopher's stone, where a bridge was built according to an astrologically calculated minute — and where that bridge is still standing more than six hundred years later.

This is the story of one city, from a wooden hillfort above a river ford to the present day. Look around as you walk; most of what you read about here is still exactly where it has always been.

Chapter 1: The Ford, the Hillfort, and the Princess Who Saw the Future

Prague did not come into existence by chance. The Vltava could be crossed here at a ford, and trade routes from west to east passed through it. Whoever controlled the ford collected tolls. That is why, in the 9th century, a hillfort was established on the rocky promontory above the river — today's Prague Castle. Vyšehrad was founded somewhat later, probably at the end of the 10th century.

Legend says that Princess Libuše, daughter of Krok and a prophetess, stood on the rock at Vyšehrad and said, "I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars." She then sent her followers downstream until they found a man carving a threshold — and that, according to the legend, is where Prague got its name. Libuše chose the ploughman Přemysl of Stadice as her husband, founding the Přemyslid dynasty, which ruled these lands for four hundred years.

A historian would add that the first documented duke was Bořivoj, who was baptized around 883, and that archaeological evidence shows Vyšehrad is younger than Prague Castle. But the legend is older than most of the things still standing in Prague, and to this day Vyšehrad has a statue of the two standing side by side.

The first written mention of Prague comes from a foreigner. Around 965, a Jewish merchant from Córdoba named Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub arrived here and wrote that Prague was "a city of stone and lime, and the greatest marketplace in the lands of the Slavs." Tin, furs, and slaves were traded here.

Chapter 2: The Castle, the Bishopric, and Murder in Stará Boleslav

Around 920, Duke Vratislav had the Church of St. George built within Prague Castle. It still stands today — the oldest surviving building in the Castle complex, with its Romanesque core still visible beneath its Baroque façade.

His son Wenceslas was well educated, spoke Latin, and tried to maintain good relations with the East Frankish king. In 935, his brother Boleslav invited him to Stará Boleslav and had him murdered outside the church. Wenceslas became a saint and the patron of the Czech lands. Boleslav I earned the nickname "the Cruel" — yet he was also a capable ruler who significantly strengthened the Czech state. His son, Boleslav II, secured the establishment of the Bishopric of Prague in 973, meaning the Czech lands no longer had to answer to the Diocese of Regensburg.

The most famous Bishop of Prague was Adalbert of the Slavník dynasty. He became so dissatisfied with conditions in Prague that he left the city twice, eventually dying as a missionary on the Baltic coast. Meanwhile, the Přemyslids massacred his family at Libice.

Chapter 3: Three Cities That Couldn't Stand Each Other

For centuries, Prague was not one city but several independent towns that disliked one another, each with its own town hall, laws, and police.

The Lesser Town beneath the Castle was founded in 1257, when King Ottokar II invited German settlers to live there. The Old Town had walls from around 1230 and, from 1338 onward, its own town hall with a tall tower. Hradčany, above the Lesser Town, was the town of the Castle's servants.

They were connected by a bridge. The first stone bridge, Judith Bridge, was built around 1170, but a flood swept it away in 1342. Its remains can still be seen beneath today's bridge, and one of its arches survives in a cellar near the Knights of the Cross monastery.

Around 1096, during the First Crusade, a pogrom took place in Prague, and the Jewish community withdrew into a fortified quarter on the banks of the Vltava. That quarter remained there for the next seven hundred years. Three hundred years after that first pogrom came a far worse one: at Easter 1389, contemporary accounts put the dead at three thousand.

Chapter 4: Charles IV, or the Greatest Century

In 1346, Charles IV ascended the throne, and within a single generation Prague became the capital of the Holy Roman Empire and one of the largest cities in Europe.

Charles was half Luxembourg, half Přemyslid. He grew up in France and spoke five languages. In thirty years, he managed to:

He founded Charles University (1348), the first university in Central Europe, and it is still operating today. He secured the elevation of the Bishopric of Prague to an archbishopric (1344), making Prague ecclesiastically independent. He laid the foundation stone of St. Vitus Cathedral and brought in the French architect Matthias of Arras. After Matthias died, the work was taken over by Peter Parler — a twenty-one-year-old who would spend the next forty years building the cathedral, the bridge, and churches across the city.

He founded the New Town of Prague — and designed it so generously that Prague would fit within its boundaries for another five hundred years. The Cattle Market (today's Charles Square), covering eight hectares, is the largest medieval square in Europe. Charles wanted it to be that enormous because it was meant to host markets, and once a year the imperial coronation jewels were displayed from the tower in its center to a crowd that had to fit somewhere.

He also had a new stone bridge built to replace the destroyed Judith Bridge. A famous legend says that its foundation stone was laid on July 9, 1357, at 5:31 in the morning. Written as numbers, the date and time form the sequence 1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1, a palindrome. Charles took astrology seriously. The bridge is still standing today.

Charles also established vineyards on the hillsides around the city, brought vines from Burgundy, and ordered that they be planted throughout Prague. And he built Karlštejn Castle to house the imperial regalia, where, with a few exceptions, women were not allowed to enter.

Chapter 5: The Hussites, Defenestration, and the General Who Couldn't See

Charles's son, Wenceslas IV, had the misfortune of ruling at the wrong time. The Church happened to have three popes at once, and people were beginning to feel that something was deeply wrong.

Master Jan Hus preached in Czech at Bethlehem Chapel in the Old Town, condemned the sale of indulgences, and appealed to the Bible over Church authorities. In 1415, he was burned at the stake in Constance despite having been granted safe conduct.

Four years later came the First Defenestration of Prague: radicals led by the priest Jan Želivský threw members of the New Town council out of the windows of the town hall, and those who survived the fall were beaten to death below. Prague would become famous for settling political disputes this way two more times.

The Hussite Wars followed. They were led by Jan Žižka, who lost both eyes yet continued commanding his armies by having the terrain described to him. He is regarded as one of the greatest military commanders of his age, and no unequivocal defeat of his has ever been documented.

Prague emerged from those years as a city where two Christian denominations legally coexisted. For almost two hundred years.

Chapter 6: Rudolf II, or the Emperor, Alchemy, and Two Planets

In 1583, Emperor Rudolf II of Habsburg moved the imperial court from Vienna to Prague, and for roughly three decades the city became the seat of the Holy Roman Emperor.

Rudolf was an eccentric, a collector, and a patron of the arts. His cabinet of curiosities at Prague Castle contained paintings, clocks, mechanical automata, minerals, a unicorn's horn (actually a narwhal tusk), and supposedly even the clay from which Adam had been created. He kept lions and tigers in the Castle moat — visitors are still shown the place in the Deer Moat where the animals were kept. He also patronized alchemists searching for the philosopher's stone in Prague, while Golden Lane owes its name to goldsmiths rather than alchemists, despite what the legend says.

More important is what happened alongside all this. At Rudolf's court worked the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe, whose observations of the planets were the most accurate of his time, and Johannes Kepler, who inherited Brahe's measurements after his death and used them to discover that the planets move in elliptical orbits. Newton later built upon those discoveries. The laws of planetary motion were born in Prague, and Brahe is buried in the Church of Our Lady before Týn on Old Town Square.

Brahe wore a metal prosthetic nose after losing his own in a duel, and, according to contemporary accounts, died after a banquet because he refused to excuse himself to use the toilet before the emperor did.

Rabbi Judah Loew also belongs to this Prague — a real and distinguished scholar to whom the legend of the Golem was only attributed some two centuries later.

Chapter 7: White Mountain, Twenty-Seven Crosses, and a Baroque City

On May 23, 1618, the Bohemian Estates threw two royal governors and their secretary out of a window at Prague Castle. All three survived because they landed on a pile of refuse in the moat — Catholics spoke of a miracle, Protestants of manure. This Third Defenestration of Prague sparked the Thirty Years' War.

The outcome came quickly. On November 8, 1620, the Battle of White Mountain, fought just outside Prague, lasted less than two hours. On June 21, 1621, twenty-seven leaders of the Bohemian Revolt were executed in Old Town Square. To this day, twenty-seven white crosses are set into the pavement there, and a memorial plaque with their names hangs on the Old Town Hall.

What followed was re-Catholicization and the emigration of Protestants. Jan Amos Comenius left the country and never returned.

Yet it was during this very period that Prague acquired the appearance it still has today. Noble families who had grown wealthy through confiscated estates built palaces — Wallenstein Palace, Černín Palace, and Sternberg Palace. The Jesuits built the Clementinum, the second-largest complex in Prague after the Castle. Thirty statues were added to Charles Bridge. The churches of Christoph and Kilian Ignaz Dientzenhofer rose across the city, as did Santini's unique Baroque Gothic architecture. Modern Prague is largely a Baroque city built upon a Gothic street plan — the legacy of an era often referred to in Czech history as the Dark Age.

In 1648, at the very end of the Thirty Years' War, the Swedes occupied the Lesser Town, but students and townspeople successfully defended the Old Town across Charles Bridge. The Swedes carried off a large part of Rudolf II's art collection to Stockholm, where much of it remains today.

Chapter 8: One City, the National Revival, and a Theatre Built by Public Donations

In 1784, Emperor Joseph II united Prague's four historic towns into a single city. He abolished around eighty monasteries, closed cemeteries within the city walls, and granted freedom of worship to non-Catholics. For the first time, Prague had a single town hall.

The nineteenth century was the century of the Czech language. In a city where German was the dominant language, scholars of the Czech National Revival began collecting words, writing grammars, and inventing new terms for concepts the language lacked. Josef Jungmann compiled a five-volume dictionary. František Palacký wrote the history of the Czech nation. In 1818, the National Museum was founded, and since 1891 it has stood at the top of Wenceslas Square.

In 1868, the foundation stone of the National Theatre was laid. The building was financed through public donations. In 1881, just two months after opening, it burned down. Within six weeks, another million gold coins had been raised, and the theatre reopened in 1883 with Smetana's Libuše.

In 1787, Mozart's Don Giovanni premiered in Prague's Estates Theatre, where the building is still used for performances today. Mozart famously said that the people of Prague understood him — the city gave him the acclaim he never quite achieved in Vienna.

At the turn of the century came the urban renewal project: the city demolished almost the entire Jewish Quarter and parts of the Old Town for sanitary reasons, replacing them with elegant Art Nouveau boulevards, including Pařížská Street. Of the original quarter, only six synagogues, the Town Hall, and the Old Jewish Cemetery remain, where around one hundred thousand people are buried in twelve layers above one another.

Chapter 9: 1918, the First Republic, and What Came After

On October 28, 1918, Czechoslovakia was proclaimed in Wenceslas Square, and Prague became the capital of the new state. President Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk moved into Prague Castle and invited the Slovenian architect Jože Plečnik to transform the former fortress into the seat of a democratic republic: new courtyards, staircases, Plečnik's Bull Staircase, and the monolith in the Third Courtyard all date from this period.

Interwar Prague embraced Functionalist architecture. Le Corbusier admired the Trade Fair Palace, while Karel Čapek gathered in the city's cafés, Franz Kafka wrote in German, and Jaroslav Hašek wrote The Good Soldier Švejk in Prague's pubs.

Then came Munich, followed by the German occupation on March 15, 1939. During the Protectorate, Acting Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich, one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, was mortally wounded in Prague in May 1942 by Czechoslovak paratroopers trained in Britain. The Nazi retaliation included the destruction of the villages of Lidice and Ležáky. The seven paratroopers died after making their last stand in the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius on Resslova Street. The church façade is still scarred by bullet holes, and they have never been repaired.

Of Prague's Jewish community, which had lived here for more than a thousand years, only a fraction survived the war. The names of nearly eighty thousand victims from the Czech lands are inscribed on the walls of the Pinkas Synagogue.

Prague was bombed twice during the war — one of the attacks by mistake. On February 14, 1945, American bombers dropped their bombs on the New Town, believing they were over Dresden. More than seven hundred people were killed, and among the buildings badly damaged was the Emmaus Monastery.

Chapter 10: Forty Years, a Tank, and a Metronome

After the Communist coup in February 1948, Prague disappeared behind the Iron Curtain. Between 1955 and 1962, Letná Hill was dominated by the largest group monument to Stalin in Europe — a fifteen-metre-high granite colossus that Prague residents nicknamed "the queue for meat." It was created by sculptor Otakar Švec, who took his own life before it was completed. Seven years after its unveiling, the monument was demolished using eight hundred kilograms of explosives. Today, a giant red metronome stands on its pedestal.

The 1960s brought political liberalization, the Czech New Wave in cinema, and the flourishing of small experimental theatres. During the night of August 21, 1968, troops from five Warsaw Pact countries invaded Czechoslovakia. The radio building on Vinohradská Street became a focal point of resistance, tanks burned outside, and bullet marks can still be seen on its walls. In January 1969, the student Jan Palach set himself on fire beneath the National Museum.

The period of "Normalization" followed. Prague built large prefabricated housing estates for a quarter of a million people, opened its metro system (the first line in 1974), and completed the Nusle Bridge, with the metro running inside it.

On November 17, 1989, police violently dispersed a student demonstration on Národní Street. Ten days later, nearly a million people gathered on Letná Plain. Thirty-one days later, the Communist government resigned, and forty-one days later Václav Havel — a playwright who had been in prison at the beginning of that year — became president. No one was killed, which is why it became known as the Velvet Revolution.

Chapter 11: The Flood the City Never Expected

In August 2002, Prague was struck by what was considered a once-in-five-hundred-years flood. The Vltava peaked at 5,160 cubic metres per second — roughly one hundred times its normal flow. Karlín, Libeň, Holešovice, the Lesser Town, Kampa Island, and Prague Zoo were flooded. The elephant Kádir died, while Gaston the sea lion was swept away and eventually reached Germany.

Nineteen metro stations were flooded, and it took seven months to restore the system. Charles Bridge survived thanks to the exceptional engineering of its foundations, the design of its piers, and the icebreakers that have protected it from the river's current and drifting ice for centuries.

High-water marks can still be seen on buildings in Kampa and Karlín, often at first-floor level. One is even visible in the Malostranská metro station near the top of the escalators. Since then, Prague has been protected by mobile flood barriers that can be erected in Karlín and along the riverfront within twelve hours.

Chapter 12: Prague in Numbers

A few final numbers. The Prague Astronomical Clock on the Old Town Hall is one of the oldest astronomical clocks in the world still in operation; it has been running since 1410 — for more than six hundred years.

Prague Castle covers almost seventy thousand square metres and, according to the Guinness World Records, is the largest coherent ancient castle complex in the world.

The city has around 1.4 million inhabitants, but every day another two to three hundred thousand commuters arrive for work. Nearly eight million tourists visit Prague each year.

Prague's metro carries more than one million passengers every day. The longest escalators, at Náměstí Míru station, are 87 metres long and take more than two minutes to ride.

There are 18 bridges across the Vltava within Prague, but Charles Bridge remains the city's unmistakable symbol. Around 30 million paving stones cover Prague's streets and squares. The city also contains nearly 200 towers, which is why it has long been called the City of a Hundred Spires.

UNESCO added Prague's historic centre to the World Heritage List in 1992. It covers 866 hectares, making it one of the largest protected historic urban areas in Europe.

You have now walked through more than a thousand years of history.

Kings, emperors, merchants, astronomers, reformers, artists, and ordinary people all left something behind here. Some built cathedrals, others bridges, others ideas that changed Europe.

Prague has survived floods, fires, wars, occupations, revolutions, and political upheavals. Yet it still looks remarkably similar to the city Charles IV knew more than six centuries ago.

When you look up at Prague Castle, cross Charles Bridge, or hear the Astronomical Clock strike the hour, you are not simply looking at monuments.

You are looking at a city that has never stopped telling its story.