Prague

• 1. Introduction

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  Prague stands on the Vltava River, its skyline so dense with steeples that a 19th-century mathematician named Bernard Bolzano counted them and arrived at a figure the Prague Information Service now estimates at 500. The city has been called the City of a Hundred Spires, the Golden City, the Mother of Cities, and the Heart of Europe. Its Jewish community, one of the oldest continuously existing in the world, has given it a different name entirely: "The city and mother in Israel." A place that has accumulated so many names across so many centuries is a place where history has pressed down hard, and Prague's archaeological deposits run more than 10 metres deep. What turned a river crossing into an imperial capital? How did a city that once housed Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, and the alchemist Edward Kelley survive the Thirty Years' War, Nazi occupation, and Soviet tanks? And how did it emerge from all of that to receive more than 8.5 million international visitors in a single year?

• 2. A City Before the City

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  Celtic tribes arrived in the area around the fifth and fourth century BC, establishing the largest Celtic oppidum in Bohemia at Závist, in what is now the south suburb of Zbraslav. They gave the wider region its name: Bohemia, meaning "home of the Boii people." Germanic tribes drove them out in the last centuries BC, and a 2nd-century map drawn by the Roman geographer Ptolemaios recorded a Germanic settlement called Casurgis near where Prague now stands. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, those Germanic groups moved westward, and Slavic tribes settled the Central Bohemian Region, probably in the 6th century AD. They built fortified settlements across the area, most notably in the Šárka valley, Butovice, and Levý Hradec. Construction of what became Prague Castle began near the end of the 9th century, expanding a fortified settlement that had existed on the site since the year 800. The first masonry beneath Prague Castle dates from 885 at the latest. The second great Prague fort, Vyšehrad, was founded in the 10th century, roughly 70 years after the castle. Czech legend ties the city's origin to the 8th-century duchess and prophetess Libuše, who reportedly stood on a rocky cliff above the Vltava and declared: "I see a great city whose glory will touch the stars." Under Duke Boleslaus II the Pious, the region became a bishopric in 973, reporting to the Archbishopric of Mainz until Prague was elevated to an archbishopric itself in 1344.

• 3. Charles IV and the Golden Age

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  In 1347, Charles IV founded Charles University, and to this day it remains the oldest university in Central Europe. His reign as Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia lasted from 1346 to 1378, and during that stretch Prague was transformed into a genuine imperial capital. By the 1470s the city held around 70,000 inhabitants within an area of roughly 360 hectares, making it the third-largest city in the Holy Roman Empire. Charles ordered the construction of the New Town adjacent to the Old Town and designed its layout himself. He commissioned the Charles Bridge to replace the Judith Bridge, which had been wrecked by a flood just before his reign began. The original Judith Bridge had been built by King Vladislaus I in 1170 and named for his wife Judith of Thuringia. When the flood of 1342 destroyed it, some of its foundation stones remained in the river. Charles IV also directed the construction of the Hunger Wall, a substantial fortification south of Malá Strana, during a famine in the 1360s. The work was reputedly ordered as a way of providing employment and food to workers and their families. His father John of Bohemia had already begun construction of the Gothic Saint Vitus Cathedral inside the Prague Castle courtyards, on the site of an older Romanesque rotunda. That cathedral would not be completed until the 20th century.

• 4. Reformation, Defenestration, and War

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  Jan Hus, a theologian and rector at Charles University, began giving sermons at the Bethlehem Chapel in 1402. Inspired by John Wycliffe, those sermons attacked what Hus saw as corruption in the Church, and they made him dangerous enough to summon to the Council of Constance, where he was put on trial for heresy and burned at the stake in Konstanz in 1415. Four years later, Prague experienced its first defenestration: the people rebelled under the Prague priest Jan Želivský, and the resulting Hussite Wars drew in the general Jan Žižka, whose forces defeated Emperor Sigismund at the Battle of Vítkov Hill in 1420. During the fighting, Prague's militia carried a swallow-tailed banner roughly 4 by 6 feet, red with white fleurs-de-lis and the words "PÁN BUH POMOC NAŠE" above the Old Town coat-of-arms. Swedish troops captured one such banner at the Battle of Prague in 1648, placing it in the Royal Military Museum in Stockholm, where it survives today in poor condition. The second defenestration, in 1618, ignited the Thirty Years' War. Ferdinand II of Habsburg was deposed and replaced as King of Bohemia by Frederick V, Elector Palatine, but Frederick's army was crushed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. The following year, 27 Czech Protestant leaders were executed in Old Town Square. The war's toll on Prague was severe: the population fell from 60,000 in the years before the war to 20,000. In 1689, a great fire devastated the city, and in 1713-14 a major outbreak of plague killed between 12,000 and 13,000 people.

• 5. Emperors, Alchemists, and Artists

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  Rudolf II, elected King of Bohemia in 1576, chose Prague as his home. He lived in Prague Castle, and his court welcomed not only astrologers and magicians but scientists, musicians, and artists. The astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, the painter Arcimboldo, the alchemists Edward Kelley and John Dee, and the poet Elizabeth Jane Weston all lived in Prague during his reign. Before Rudolf, in 1526, the Bohemian estates had elected Ferdinand I of the House of Habsburg, whose fervent Catholicism eventually brought him into conflict with a city where Protestant ideas were gaining ground. Empress Maria Theresa expelled the Jews from Prague in 1745, and although she rescinded that expulsion in 1748, the proportion of Jewish residents never recovered to its earlier level. By 1708, Jews had accounted for about a quarter of Prague's population. In 1757, during the Seven Years' War, Prussian bombardment destroyed more than one-quarter of the city and heavily damaged St. Vitus Cathedral. A month later, Frederick the Great was defeated and forced to retreat from Bohemia. Under Joseph II in 1784, the four municipalities of Malá Strana, Nové Mesto, Staré Mesto, and Hradčany were merged into a single entity. The Jewish district, Josefov, was incorporated only in 1850. By 1771, Prague's population had risen to 80,000, and by the time the first suburb, Karlín, was created in 1817, the population was on its way to exceeding 100,000.

• 6. War, Occupation, and Resistance

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  On the 15th of March 1939, Hitler ordered the German Army to enter Prague and from Prague Castle proclaimed Bohemia and Moravia a German protectorate. During the subsequent occupation, most of the city's Jewish population was deported and killed. In 1942, Prague was the site of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany, carried out during Operation Anthropoid by Czechoslovak national heroes Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš. In February 1945, US Army Air Forces bombing raids killed 701 people, injured more than 1,000, and destroyed several historic structures including Emmaus Monastery, Faust House, and Vinohrady Synagogue. American pilots described the bombing as the result of a navigational mistake. On the 5th of May 1945, two days before Germany surrendered, an uprising against German occupation began. Several thousand Czechs were killed in four days of street fighting. At daybreak on the 9th of May, the 3rd Shock Army of the Red Army entered and took the capital almost without opposition. After the war, the world's largest Stalin Monument was unveiled on Letná hill in 1955 and destroyed in 1962. The 4th Czechoslovak Writers' Congress, held in Prague in June 1967, took a strong public position against the regime. Student demonstrations followed on the 31st of October 1967, helping to push the new Communist Party secretary Alexander Dubček toward what became the Prague Spring. The other Warsaw Pact countries, with the exception of Romania and Albania, joined the Soviet Union in suppressing those reforms through an invasion on the 21st of August 1968. Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc committed suicide by self-immolation in January and February 1969 to protest the "normalisation" that followed.

• 7. After the Velvet Revolution

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  In 1989, after riot police beat back a peaceful student demonstration, the Velvet Revolution brought crowds into the streets of Prague. In 1992, the Historic Centre of Prague was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. In 1993, following the Velvet Divorce, Prague became the capital of the newly formed Czech Republic. Its main airport was renamed Václav Havel Airport in 2012, honouring the country's former first president, who had died in late 2011. Prague's economy accounts for 25% of Czech GDP, and its GDP per capita in purchasing power standard reached EUR 58,216 as of 2021, placing it third among EU regions. Services account for around 80% of employment in the city. On the 5th of April 2009, US President Barack Obama delivered a speech in Prague that led to the New START treaty, signed in the city on the 8th of April 2010. On the 21st of December 2023, a mass shooting at Charles University killed fifteen people and injured 25, making it the deadliest mass murder in the history of the Czech Republic. The city today hosts 39 of the Czech Academy of Sciences' 54 institutes, including the Institute of Physics, and was selected to house the administration of the EU's Galileo satellite navigation system, which began providing its first services in December 2016.