Copyright © 2009 The Free Prague Guide. All rights reserved.
The structure of the below table of content is based on the book “Prague Pilgrim” by Vladislav Dudák. The chapters are provided with wonderful photos by Jiří Podrazil and accompanied by a route map. The percentage by each chapter represents the state of its completeness.
Like Rome, it is said, old Prague stood on 7 hills, but that number is now changing. We will climb some of them so that we can acquaint ourselves with a panorama of the town. Prague is photogenic and looks impressive from all sides. The greatest credit for this belongs without doubt to the river Vltava. There are certainly many cities situated on a river, but perhaps no other gains so much charm by it. Thanks to a 100,000 years of erosion by the flow of the river through the Prague valley, there appeared a picturesque, natural landscape, which human activity merely had to complete with a town to create a harmony of natural beauty and art.
Almost from the beginning of Czech history, people's attention turned to the elongated hill above the Vltava whose shape was compared by chronicler Kosmas to “the back of a dolphin or sea pig”. On this hill there grew over the centuries, the unique group of buildings of Prague Castle whose significance was heightened because they constituted not only the secular but also the religious centre of the country.
The town of Hradčany (castle settlement) is the continuation of Prague Castle as far as the view is concerned. With its “face” turned to the Vltava valley it enriches unforgettably the picturesque panorama of the hill above the Lesser Town. The town itself was not the seat of kings, but it is so closely connected with Prague Castle that it will be discussed in the context of this chapter about Royal Prague.
Upon my word, if fate drove me to the furthest corner of the Earth, I could not otherwise but wander back after a while to ancient Vyšehrad and refresh my mind with the view, said Karel Hynek Mácha. Those words speak for the whole Czech romantic generation for whom Vyšehrad became a symbol of the beginnings of Czech history. The remains evoking the past glories of Vyšehrad are very few, but this has only served to encourage a prodigious cycle of Vyšehrad myths and legends.
The River Vltava gives the city life both spiritually and practically. It forms the main axis of the town, adorned with numerous bridges, of which the oldest - Karlův most (Charles Bridge) - is considered to be the symbolic entrance gate to the kingdom. Vltava is a river honoured and celebrated as “the girdle of Prague, the beautiful”.
On the left bank of the Vltava, in the triangle defined by the river, Hradčany and Petřín Hill, lies Malá Strana (The Lesser Town). Looking from the gardens of the Strahov Monastery we see how a scattering of red roofs drops down from the green hillsides to the river, only interrupted in the centre by the green cupola of St Nicholas' Church. Palaces, gardens and churches have used the natural conditions so perfectly that in the Lesser Town a vision has been created which will never seem commomplace.
The Old Town remains to this day the nucleus of the city's development and at the same time the most sensitive barometer of the rise and fall of the Czech lands. Every epoch has left its mark here. The town grew, developed and changed in response to immediate needs, died off in parts and was recreated under the influence of new artistic styles. Out of all the Prague towns, it is this one which has the greatest concentration of people and the least amount of green space. The Old Town is dominated by street walls - the direct and least transient witnesses of the long past.
In 1893 an unusual bustle started in the Prague “Fifth Quarter”, the former ghetto nowadays called Josefov. People were abandonning their homes and were gradually leaving the streets to surveyors, town council commissioners and eventually demolition squads. No, it was not a pogrom, through which this district, bounded approximately by today's Kaprova and Dušní Streets, had lived countless times, even though that it was the end of the ancient Židovské Město (the Jewish Town).
At that time this curious town was 93,000 sq metres in area, only a few metres more than it was at its beginning. Its size was 1/9th of the Old Town and 1/13th of the Lesser Town, and yet still managed to squeeze in about 1900 inhabitants. It was a quarter of grey houses and narrow streets. Green vegetation was found only in the Old Cemetery, in the shape of shrubs and crawling ivy; trees did not grow here except those which had been painted on walls by someone. The rooms in the old houses were divided up by a line drawn with chalk on the floor, or by a string stretched at head height. In every corner lived a family and all life was public - old people being ill, married couples making love, prostitutes, children and women giving birth. The shop windows were full of second hand clothes, jumble and items which had once been made by human hand but which had no name. For every ten houses there was one synagogue and for a long time it had been not so much a town of Jews as a town of the poor and the dispossessed. The streets livened up at night with the glow of red lights, which after 1862 it was mandatory to display on a long pole outside every brothel. Apparently there were so many that it seemed as if, at night, every house turned into a wild tavern. Mingled with the booming of the dance halls, the shouts of drunkards and the laughter of loose women from neighbouring houses, was the singing of psalms from the mouths of orthodox Jews, who held out longest against leaving their town and who during the demolition of the walls replaced them with chains, so that they could separate the Lord's chosen people from the neighbouring, sinful world.
It really seemed as if the last chapter was being written about this mysterious, suffering, town with strange powers of attraction. Regrettably it was not so. In the new houses and the new streets, sited in the old place, a modern tragedy was to be unfolded: under the supervision of SS guards, Jews were registered here from the whole of Bohemia, before their journey to the death camps.
During the reign of Charles IV, Prague became the centre of The Holy Roman Empire and was living through a golden age. The Old Town had used up nearly all the possibilities for expansion and could no longer manage to absorb the unending stream of newcomers. It was typical of the Emperor that the ensuing difficulties were resolved not simply by adding to the Old Town a new district, but by his decision to create a whole “new town” which was to be separate.
Nowadays the New Town as a whole is not particularly attractive to tourists, because it always tried to be modern and its energetic development has not displayed any great sensitivity to the achievements of the past. However we must not forget that as we pass the facades of 19th and 20th century houses we walk along the same streets which, more than 500 years ago, were laid out on the orders of Emperor Charles IV. We will find however that despite all the changes and alterations there is still a lot to interest us here.
In the aftermath of the Thirty Year War, the military authorities in Prague set about constructing a uniform line of defensive walls around the whole city. These 14 km long Baroque fortifications with 9 gates, were built between 1653 and 1730 according to plans by the military engineer Count de Conti, and enclosed Prague in a defensive shell up until the end of the 19th century. Only after the walls had been demolished to make way for streets and parks, Prague could grow into a modern city.