Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
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...
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...
Agnes of Bohemia, sister of King Wenceslas I, was responsible for founding the very first Franciscan institutions in Bohemia. Her personal friendship with St Clare of Assisi – they corresponded with each other for twenty...
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...
Between the left bank of the river Vltava and Petřín Hill stand two churches dedicated to St Lawrence (Svatý Vavřinec). The more substantial of the two, on the hill itself, is a baroque structure built...
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...
The Bank of the Legions (Legionářská banka, or Legiobanka) was founded in 1919 in the Siberian city of Irkutsk as a depository for the savings of Czechoslovak soldiers returning from the First World War. As...
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...
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...
