Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
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...
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...
In the year 863, the Orthodox missionary brothers Cyril and Methodius began translating the Bible into the language known as Old Church Slavonic, using a specially-formulated script from which was derived the later ‘Cyrillic’ alphabet....
Since the early 1920s, pressure had grown for a Hussite church in the neighbourhood of Vršovice. The plan was finally realized in 1930 by the architect Karel Truksa, and the church constructed within a year...
This framed Mother and Child appears on the ornamental facade of a neo-baroque house in Prague’s New Town. The building, at the corner of the major thoroughfare Ječná (Barley Street), is home to a traditional...
Originally erected at the centre of Prague’s Horse Market (Koňský trh) this statue of Bohemia’s tenth-century ruler is the work of the prolific Baroque artist Jan Jiří Bendl, who sculpted it in 1678 in exchange...
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Prague was struck by devastating plagues, first in 1680 and again in 1787. The area of Olšany, then outside the city walls, was chosen to accommodate the dead. The...
At the centre of Strossmayer Square in Holešovice stands the neo-gothic Church of Saint Anthony of Padua. If its profile looks faintly familiar, that’s because its soaring towers were deliberately modelled on those of the...
Ordained by Charles IV in 1347 on the day after his coronation, the original intention was to construct a great triple-aisled basilica reflecting the status of Prague as a second Rome. Even its name –...
Also known as the Jerusalem synagogue and ‘Velká synagoga’ or ‘Great synagogue’, the Jubilee synagogue was originally proposed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the reign of Franz Josef I in 1898. Five years earlier,...
