Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
Halfway along the impressive southern rampart of Prague Castle stands the Ludvík wing, a five-storey bastion built between 1503 and 1509 and named after Ludvík Jagellonský, ruler of Bohemia from 1516 to 1526. Its architect,...
These handsome semi-detached villas in Prague’s Střešovice district look just as though they were uprooted from suburban London, the new middle-class landscape for which the poet John Betjeman coined the name ‘Metroland’. So it’s no...
A stone’s throw from the east end of the Cathedral of Saint Vitus stands the smaller but no less significant Basilica of Saint George (Bazilika svatého Jiří). Founded in 920 by Duke Vratislav I, the...
These fine art nouveau apartments on the border of the Vinohrady and Žižkov districts date from 1910; they were built by Antonín Polívka to a design by the architect Josef Pospíšil. Seven years earlier, Pospíšil...
Orlík takes its name from ‘orel’, the Czech word for an eagle; and indeed for many centuries this rocky outcrop rising 200 feet above the river Vltava must have made a dramatic eyrie for the...
Visitors to Prague cannot fail to be struck by the number of monuments and locations that bear the name ‘Charles’. They include the city’s mediaeval university, its largest public square, and of course its magnificent...
The street in Prague’s Vinohrady district named after the composer Frédéric Chopin presents, as they say, a ‘smorgasbord’ of historical styles: one end is all gothic revival, turrets and bay windows, while the other exhibits...
The ornate Parisian-style apartment blocks of Kodaňská Street and its immediate neighbourhood are some of the most impressive domestic houses in Prague. But even those not facing directly onto that grand boulevard still have a...
Originally a shrine to the Virgin built by the Cistercian order from nearby Plasy, the Church of the Annunciation at Mariánská Týnice rises impressively from the open countryside of Western Bohemia, just north of Plzeň. The...
The Benedictine convent of St George at Prague Castle was already long established when, in 1228, King Otakar I of Bohemia gifted the nearby village of Břežany to the nuns. The village, whose name comes...
