Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
Alongside the refurbished barracks that now form the Palladium shopping centre in Prague’s New Town sits the unassuming single-gabled church of St Joseph. It was built between 1636 and 1653 by Melichar Mayer for the...
Almost exactly halfway between the cities of Hradec Králové and Trutnov in the north of the Czech Republic, the river Elbe flows through the pleasant wooded valley of Kuks, from which the land rises gently...
Situated on the banks of the river Vltava about twenty miles north of Prague, the chateau of Veltrusy was commissioned in 1704 for the counts of Chotek. Work began around the year 1706 to a...
The high ground to the west of Prague called Bílá Hora was the scene of one of the earliest engagements of the Thirty Years’ War. The short but significant ‘Battle of the White Mountain’ of...
By common consent, the first coffee-seller appeared in Prague in 1714. Originally from Damascus, the lively Armenian entrepreneur Gorgos Hatalah worked the streets of Malá Strana selling ‘Turkish’ coffee heated on a portable brazier, and...
Between 1736 and 1737 the original renaissance palace by Giovanni Battista Aliprandi was rebuilt in the high baroque style for Prince Paul Henry of Mansfeld, probably by the architect Franz Ignaz Prée. Despite late rococo...
Agnes of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslas I, was responsible for founding the very first Franciscan institutions in Bohemia. Her personal friendship with St Clare of Assisi – they corresponded with each other for twenty...
Deep in the southern suburbs of Prague – an area now dominated by highways and housing estates – this thirteenth-century gothic fortress is an unexpected witness to a much older history, dating from the time...
Between the left bank of the river Vltava and Petřín Hill stand two churches dedicated to St Lawrence (Svatý Vavřinec). The more substantial of the two, on the hill itself, is a baroque structure built...
Legend has it that the ninth-century saints Cyril and Methodius baptized their first Moravian disciples in this wooded valley a few miles northeast of Brno (about 150 miles southeast of Prague). The village of Křtiny...
