Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
Humprecht Jan Černín (Czernin, in the usual German spelling) came from one of the wealthiest families in the Czech lands, whose fortunes were enriched still further following the Catholic victory in the Thirty Years’ War....
This sumptuous late renaissance structure in Prague’s Malá Strana district was developed from a property owned by the Kinsky family. After 1623, on the instructions of the new owner Pavel Michna of Vacínov, it was...
Today’s Police Headquarters in Vinohrady (Prague 10) started life as the dispatching centre for the state energy provider České Energetické Závody (ČEZ). It was constructed between 1948 and 1952 according to a design by the...
The banks of the Vltava contain a rich heritage of industrial architecture, from water towers to breweries, from weirs to watermills. The island known since the 18th century as ‘Kampa’ (possibly from its use as...
The earliest gothic building in Prague, the Convent of Saint Agnes was constructed in 1231 on a riverside plot later known as ‘Na Františku’ (St Francis’s). The site had been donated by King Wenceslas I...
Embedded in a wall of the vestibule of Můstek metro at the northern end of Wenceslas Square is the little bridge (‘můstek’) that gives the underground station its name. The marlstone bridge, constructed in the...
Of all the work of Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann, perhaps the most outstanding is the building that today houses the Czech Academy of Sciences (Akademie věd). Ullmann’s grand neo-renaissance plan saw off competition from a large...
According to legend, in order to keep it safe from the hands of the infidel, the simple house in which the Virgin Mary is supposed to have lived was transported from Nazareth by divine intervention....
The seeds of a national museum were sown as early as the 1780s with the establishment of the Royal Bohemian Society of Learning, ancestor of today’s Academy of Sciences. Its members were wealthy, aristocratic and...
The founding of the so-called ‘New Town’ in 1348 made Prague the third largest city by area in the whole of Europe after Rome and Constantinople. According to the census of thirty years later, the...
