Lány Chateau
The village of Lány, twenty miles from Prague, stands in a region of fields and forests used for hunting since at least the tenth century. But it was in 1587 that Emperor Rudolf II forged...
Category: historicist
Apolinářská 441/18: Provincial Maternity Hospital
Completed in 1875, the Provincial Maternity Hospital in Prague represented the state of the art in nineteenth-century obstetrics. At that time, many young mothers died in childbirth; so in 1867, on the orders of Count...
Liberec Town Hall
The north Bohemian town of Liberec may be only seventy miles from Prague but its origins as an important centre of the Flemish and German textile trade are evident everywhere – not least in the...
Hybernská 11 and Havlíčkova 1: Lannův palác
Built on the site of the fifteenth-century House of the Black Hare, this neo-renaissance palace in the Venetian style was erected in 1857 for Vojtěch Lanna, founder of the Kladno steelworks. As often in the...
Petrohradská 141/52: Vila Jitřenka
This villa by the banks of the Botič – currently home to the Prague Gentlemen’s Fly Fishing Club – dates from 1738, and is therefore only slightly younger than the nearby Church of St Nicholas,...
Prague Astronomical Clock (Orloj)
The exact authorship of the mediaeval clock (‘orloj’) in Prague’s Old Town Square is confused, but it seems to have been the result of a collaboration between Mikuláš of Kadaň and Jan Šindel, an astronomer...
Vinohradská 1200/50: Vinohradská tržnice
The distinctive russet-coloured Vinohradská tržnice (Vinohrady market hall) was constructed on the site of a former machine factory in 1902, one of several new covered marketplaces built at that time to serve Prague’s rapidly expanding...
Havlíčkovo náměstí
Karel Havlíček Borovský (1821 to 1856) was a free-thinking writer and journalist whose liberal views were strongly influential in the debate regarding Czech independence in the mid-nineteenth century. A critic equally of the Austrian regime...
Church of St Procopius, Žižkov
Josef Mocker and František Mikš were at the forefront of the Gothic revival in the Czech lands. The former was the architect of the Church of Saint Ludmila in Vinohrady (1888-92) while the latter designed...
Václavské náměstí: Statue of Saint Wenceslas
Prince Václav I – known to the English-speaking world as ‘Good King Wenceslas’ – was one of Bohemia’s first Christian rulers. On 28 September in the year 929 (some say 935) he was murdered by...
