Jindřišská 909/14: Main Post Office
Postal services in Bohemia started in 1526, when mounted couriers made the first deliveries between Prague and Vienna, the twin seats of the Habsburgs. But it was not until the reign of Maria Theresa in...
Tagged: allegorical
Moskevská 77/4
Of the many celebrated Czech architects of the first decade of the twentieth century, perhaps the most prolific was the Austrian-born Osvald Polívka. Best known for civic projects such as Prague’s new City Hall (1911)...
Na Příkopě 18 & 20: Zemská banka (Provincial Bank)
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Czech politics was dominated by one question: how to gain greater autonomy from the Austrian empire (or indeed how to break with Austria entirely). The argument was...
Polská 1283/18: ‘The Assyrian Kings’
Prague’s well-heeled residential district of Vinohrady is renowned for its grand apartment blocks, built at the turn of the 20th century in a variety of historicist styles. Their monumental entrances and lavish facades present a...
Slezská 100/7: House of Agricultural Education
Agriculture had been studied as an academic discipline since the 1780s in Prague, but it was the emergence of the fledgling state of Czechoslovakia in 1918 that prompted widescale practical reforms to the agricultural economy....
Hospital and Church of the Holy Trinity, Kuks
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...
Liliová 17 and Karlova 18: The Golden Snake
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...
Karlova 189/2: Colloredo-Mansfeld Palace
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...
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...
Malé náměstí 456/14: The Black Pony
The Black Pony stands in the heart of the Old Town, one of a row of attractive renaissance town-houses which in the early fifteenth century were home to the city’s first pharmacies. Its neighbours include...
