Ten centuries of European architecture & heritage
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...
Josef Mocker and František Mikš were at the forefront of the Gothic revival in the Czech lands. The former was the architect of the Church of Saint Ludmila in Vinohrady (1888-92) while the latter designed...
Six hundred years ago, in 1414, the practice of administering communion ‘in both kinds’ (i.e. with consecrated bread and wine for all participants, not just the clergy) was restored in Prague. The execution of the...
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...
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...
A relief depicting Cecilia, patron saint of music, seated at a chamber organ, appears on the southwest-facing wall of this house in Žižkov.
The plaque below the bust tells that ‘From 1907 to 1912, the Czech poet and Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert attended this school’. The school in question, in the district of Žižkov, is now named...
Look up at this apartment block in the Prague quarter of Žižkov and you will notice three renaissance figures – knight, nun and lutenist – tripping across a landscape of ribbons and linden leaves. The...
