Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
Humprecht Jan Černín (Czernin, in the usual German spelling) came from one of Bohemia’s wealthiest families, their fortunes enriched still further by the Catholic victory in the Thirty Years’ War. His great-uncle had served at...
Born in 1818, František Ladislav Rieger was from his student days a passionate advocate of Czech nationalism. His 1848 speech in Vienna won him the admiration of František Palacký, who was to become not only...
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...
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...
Originally a single-storey construction, this magnificent three-winged palace was built between 1703 and 1706 by the architect Giovanni Battista Aliprandi for Count Karel Přehořovský of Kvasejovice, Master of the Royal Mint. In 1753, it was...
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...
The first television signals in Prague were transmitted from Petřín Hill in 1953. By 1974, however, there was a clear need for a purpose-built high-power transmitter, and plans started to be drawn up for a...
Vítkov Hill, due east of Prague’s historic centre, has always been an important strategic site. It was here in 1420 that Jan Žižka, scourge of the Holy Roman Empire and zealous warrior of the Hussite...
The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1918 saw the emergence of a number of independent European nation-states, of which Czechoslovakia was one. Instrumental in the creation of the new republic was the then president...
František Palacký (pronounced Palat-ski), is one of three men honoured with the title ‘Father of the Nation’, the other two being the 14th-century emperor Charles IV and the first President of Czechoslovakia Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk....
