Prague

💡 About Prague

Prague, the Golden City of a Hundred Spires, is one of Europe's best-preserved medieval capitals — a fact explained not by careful conservation but by a combination of remarkable luck and strategic decisions: it escaped significant damage in both the Thirty Years' War and World War II, preserving intact its extraordinary collection of Romanesque crypts, Gothic cathedrals, Renaissance palaces, Baroque churches and Art Nouveau boulevards, all layered upon each other across ten centuries of continuous urban development. The Astronomical Clock mounted on the Old Town Hall, first installed in 1410 and therefore the world's oldest surviving mechanical astronomical clock, performs on every hour: a parade of the Twelve Apostles revolves through two windows, followed by a golden cockerel flapping its wings and crowing, while allegorical figures of Vanity, Greed, Death and a Turkish soldier rotate on the dial — a ceremony that has been drawing crowds every hour for over 600 years. Prague Castle, which dominates the left bank of the Vltava River from a rocky promontory and covers over 70,000 square metres of palaces, churches, gardens and galleries, is the largest ancient castle complex in the world; it has served as the seat of Bohemian kings, Holy Roman Emperors, Austro-Hungarian rulers and Czech presidents, and the changing of the guard at its gates is performed daily with crisp military precision.

The Velvet Revolution of November 1989, which ended 41 years of Communist rule without a single shot fired, was centred in Prague — students, intellectuals and eventually hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered in Wenceslas Square night after night until the Communist government resigned, in a peaceful political transformation so swift and extraordinary that playwright-turned-president Václav Havel called it a "fairy tale." Czech beer culture is arguably the most developed in the world: Czechs consume more beer per capita than any other nation on Earth (approximately 142 litres per person per year), and the country's brewing tradition — from the Pilsner Urquell brewery in Plzeň (inventor of pilsner-style lager in 1842) to the dark dunkel of southern Bohemia — spans over a thousand years of monastic and civic brewing. Franz Kafka was born, lived and is buried in Prague; the city's labyrinthine streets, bureaucratic old buildings and dreamlike atmosphere of walking between medieval and modern, between German and Czech culture, between Habsburg past and socialist present, seem to have seeped directly into the alienated, anxious prose of his greatest works including The Trial and The Metamorphosis. The Charles Bridge, constructed between 1357 and 1402 by Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, is decorated with 30 Baroque statues of saints added between 1683 and 1714; the statue of St John of Nepomuk, thrown from the bridge on the orders of King Wenceslas IV in 1393, bears a brass relief worn bright by the hands of millions of tourists who touch it for good luck.

⭐ Known For