Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
The baroque statues for which Charles Bridge is rightly famous are not arranged according to any predetermined plan. They were erected individually over many decades, part of the programme of recatholicization after the Thirty Years’...
Radio broadcasts in Czechoslovakia began on 18 May 1923, making the fledgling state only the second country in Europe after Britain to enjoy such a regular service. For the first two years, programmes were broadcast...
On its plain white pedestal, the graceful ‘Dívka s holubicí’ (Girl with a Dove, 1979) by sculptor Jiří Kryštůfek is a strikingly elegant work of public art. The simplicity of the piece conceals the skilful...
Prague is a city full of stories of artificial human beings, from the Golem, a mud-man devised by the 16th century Rabbi Loew to protect the Jewish community, to the bizarrely mummified remains of Klement...
Vyšehrad cemetery was established in 1869 as a national burial ground for eminent Czechs from all walks of life, but especially those from the arts, the sciences, and the world of politics. Among its well-known...
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...
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...
In 1999, a statue of the British statesman and wartime leader Sir Winston Churchill was unveiled by Margaret Thatcher in the square in Prague that has borne his name since the Velvet Revolution. Hunched and...
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...
Nicholas Winton’s humanitarian work in saving hundreds of Jewish children from the grim certainty of the Holocaust came to light only in 1988. But in the years since, thanks to the efforts of the Slovak...
