Convent of Saint Agnes
The earliest gothic building in Prague, the Convent of Saint Agnes was constructed in 1231 on a riverside plot later known as ‘Na Františku’ (St Francis’s). The site had been donated by King Wenceslas I...
Tagged: religious
Prague Loreto
According to legend, in order to keep it safe from the hands of the infidel, the simple house in which the Virgin Mary is supposed to have lived was transported from Nazareth by divine intervention....
Novoměstská radnice: New Town Hall
The founding of the so-called ‘New Town’ in 1348 made Prague the third largest city by area in the whole of Europe after Rome and Constantinople. According to the census of thirty years later, the...
Basilica of Saint Wenceslas, Smíchov
The township of Smíchov, on the left bank of the Vltava, was a centre of Christian worship from the earliest times. The first Carthusian monastery in Bohemia stood close to here, from its foundation in...
Charles Bridge: Saints Cyril and Methodius
On 3 September 1890, a powerful flood washed away three arches of Charles Bridge. Two eighteenth-century statues by Ferdinand Maxmilián Brokoff toppled into the river and were smashed to pieces. Enough was salvaged to be...
Charles Bridge: Jan Nepomuk
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’...
Charles Bridge: Saint Lutgardis
Visitors to Prague are always surprised to learn that the avenue of saints keeping watch over Charles Bridge was never planned as a single architectural scheme. In fact the statues were created by no fewer...
Charles Bridge: Saint Ivo
Saint Ivo Helory was a thirteenth-century parish priest from Brittany who was canonized in 1347. He trained as a lawyer and rapidly made his name as an advocate for orphans, widows and the poor. Two...
Karlův Most: Charles Bridge
In 1170, King Vladislav II of Bohemia commissioned a stone bridge connecting the Old Town and Malá Strana. Built just downstream of the present structure, the surviving buttress of the former bridge can still be...
Dušní 141/12: The Spanish Synagogue
Erected on the site of the mediaeval ‘Old School’ synagogue, the present structure dates from 1868. Many names are associated with the plans for the building, including that of Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann, but it seems...
