CitiesCzechia
Prague looks the way it does because of things that did not happen to it. Charles IV built it large and early in the fourteenth century, as an imperial capital with a university, a cathedral and a whole new town attached. Then the twentieth century, which levelled Warsaw, Dresden and Berlin, largely passed it over. The one heavy raid it took was an accident: American crews in February 1945 who believed they were over Dresden, more than a hundred kilometres away.
The stone bridge begun in 1357 under Charles IV, replacing one a flood had destroyed, and the only fixed crossing here for centuries. The baroque statues along it are later additions and most are copies, the originals having been moved indoors. Cross it at six in the morning if you want any sense of what it is actually like.
Not a single building but a walled district containing a cathedral, palaces, a basilica and a lane of small houses, and by area one of the largest castle complexes anywhere. It has been the seat of Bohemian kings, Holy Roman Emperors and Czechoslovak and Czech presidents in turn. The continuity of function across that many regimes is the unusual part.
The Gothic cathedral inside the castle walls, begun in 1344 and not finished until 1929, which is a gap of nearly six hundred years. The seam is visible if you know where to look: the eastern end is medieval, the nave and west front are late nineteenth and twentieth century, built in deliberate imitation of what came before.
The medieval square and its clock, installed in 1410, which tracks not just the hour but the position of the sun and moon and the old Bohemian time. The apostles parading on the hour are a much later addition. The crowd watching them is generally larger than the spectacle warrants, which locals will tell you without being asked.
Founded by Charles IV in 1348 as a planned expansion three times the size of the old town, with squares laid out for specific markets. It is where most of the Allied bombs actually fell in 1945. Calling a district founded in 1348 the New Town is the kind of thing that only makes sense in a city this old.
Josefov, containing several synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetery, where limited ground forced burials to be stacked in layers and left headstones crowded at angles. What stands is a fragment. Most of the quarter was cleared in a slum-clearance programme around the turn of the twentieth century, decades before the occupation, and the surviving buildings are the exception rather than the rule.
Completed around 1270 and the oldest active synagogue in Europe, still in weekly use. The attic is traditionally said to hold the remains of the Golem, which is folklore rather than history, and the building's real distinction is simply that it has functioned continuously for over seven centuries through everything that happened around it.
Not a square but a long boulevard, laid out by Charles IV as a horse market. It is where the crowds gathered in 1968 and again in 1989, which makes it the country's political stage rather than a monument. The statue at the top is the assembly point everyone means when they say they will meet at the horse.
Two baroque halls in a monastery above the castle, ceilings frescoed, shelves packed with books nobody has taken down in a long time. Visitors are generally kept at the doorway rather than admitted to the floor. It is the best surviving example in the city of what a private intellectual world looked like before public libraries existed.
The other castle, on a rock above the river south of the centre, with a cemetery holding Dvořák, Smetana and Mucha. Almost nobody visits it. It has the views the crowds are queuing for on the other side of town and a national pantheon attached, and it is a twenty-minute walk from the tourist crush.
Prague was bombed by mistake, by crews who thought they were over Dresden.
In February 1945 American B-17s navigating to Dresden came in over central Prague instead and released more than 150 tonnes of bombs, killing around 700 people and destroying dozens of buildings. Prague is over a hundred kilometres from the intended target.
Prague's cathedral took nearly six hundred years to finish.
St Vitus was begun in 1344 and completed in 1929. The eastern end is genuinely medieval; the nave and western facade are modern work built in imitation of it, which is why the building reads as more coherent than its history suggests.
The New Town has been called that since 1348.
Charles IV founded it as a planned expansion roughly three times the area of the old town, with separate squares designated for cattle, horses and hay. The name stuck and never updated, which is why Prague has a seven-hundred-year-old New Town.
Most of Prague's Jewish quarter was demolished by the city, not by an occupier.
Josefov was largely cleared in a slum-clearance and restructuring programme around 1900. The synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetery that visitors walk through today are what was left standing, not what was there.
Europe's oldest working synagogue has been in use for over 750 years.
The Old-New Synagogue in Josefov dates to around 1270 and still holds services. It has functioned continuously through the Habsburgs, the Nazi occupation and forty years of state atheism.
The country's two revolutions happened on a horse market.
Wenceslas Square is a long boulevard rather than a square, laid out by Charles IV for trading horses. It is where the crowds assembled during the 1968 Soviet invasion and again during the Velvet Revolution in 1989.
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