Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic, a city of about 1.3 million people on the Vltava river. Its historic centre — Gothic, Renaissance and baroque layered on a medieval street plan — survived the Second World War essentially intact, which makes it one of the largest and best-preserved historic cores of any European capital.
Why the old city is still standing
Warsaw was deliberately razed. Dresden, Berlin, Budapest and Vienna suffered severe bombing or ground fighting. Prague did not, and the reason is a sequence of circumstances rather than any protective intent.
Czechoslovakia was occupied without a general campaign after the Munich Agreement of 1938 and the German occupation of the remainder in 1939, so there was no battle for the city at the start of the war. As an industrial centre inside German-held territory it was bombed by the Allies, but on a limited scale, and one raid in February 1945 struck the city centre — reportedly in error, the crews having believed they were over Dresden — killing several hundred people and damaging buildings including the Emmaus Monastery.
The Prague uprising in May 1945 brought fighting to the streets in the war's final days, and the Old Town Hall's neo-Gothic wing was destroyed, but the German garrison withdrew before the city was systematically fought over.
What survived is roughly 866 hectares of protected historic centre, inscribed by UNESCO in 1992 — an unusually large designated area, containing Romanesque cellars beneath Gothic houses beneath baroque façades, because the city was repeatedly rebuilt upward rather than cleared.
Beer, and a city that drinks more of it than anyone
The Czech Republic has the highest per-capita beer consumption of any country in the world, and has held that position for decades. Prague's pubs are the everyday counterweight to its monumental core.
The style that dominates global brewing was invented here — or rather 90 km west, in Plzeň, where in 1842 a Bavarian brewer produced the first pale bottom-fermented lager. Pilsner is now the template for the majority of beer made worldwide, and the original is still brewed under the Pilsner Urquell name.
Brewing in Prague is older than that. U Fleků has operated since 1499, and monastic breweries at Strahov and Břevnov go back further still. Beer is priced and regulated as something close to a staple, and in many pubs it costs less than bottled water — a fact visitors mention constantly and locals do not. See our Hungary guide for a neighbouring capital with a comparable relationship to its own thermal water.
Charles IV and the century that built it
Prague's dominant period is the fourteenth century, under Charles IV, who was both King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor and made the city his imperial capital.
His building programme was extraordinary in scope: St Vitus Cathedral begun in 1344 in the French Gothic manner; Charles University founded in 1348, the first university north of the Alps and east of Paris; the New Town laid out on a scale that took centuries to fill; and the Charles Bridge begun in 1357 to replace a stone predecessor destroyed by flood.
The bridge is the emblem. Its foundation stone was reportedly laid at a numerologically auspicious moment — 5:31 a.m. on 9 July 1357, giving the palindromic sequence 1357 9/7 5:31 — and it carried all traffic across the Vltava for over five centuries. The baroque statues lining it were added from the late 1600s onward, and most of what stands there now are replicas, the originals having been moved indoors.
The astronomical clock, and what it actually shows
The Orloj on the Old Town Hall, installed in 1410, is the oldest astronomical clock still in operation. It is also more complicated than the hourly procession of apostles that draws the crowds suggests.
Its main dial is an astrolabe showing the position of the sun and moon against the zodiac, and it tracks four different systems of time at once — including Old Bohemian time, counted in 24 hours from sunset, which is why one ring of numerals rotates through the year. The calendar dial below was added later and repainted in the nineteenth century.
The clock was badly damaged in the fighting of May 1945 and rebuilt afterwards, so parts of what visitors watch are post-war reconstruction on a medieval mechanism.
Two defenestrations, both consequential
Prague has an unusual habit of resolving political disputes by throwing officials out of windows, and twice the consequences were continental.
In 1419, radical Hussites threw members of the town council from the New Town Hall, triggering the Hussite Wars — a religious and national conflict a century before the Reformation proper, following the burning of the reformer Jan Hus at Constance in 1415.
In 1618, Protestant nobles threw two Catholic regents and a secretary from a window of Prague Castle. All three survived — landing, according to Catholic accounts, through divine intervention, and according to Protestant ones, in a dung heap. That incident is generally taken as the trigger of the Thirty Years' War, which killed a very large proportion of central Europe's population over the following three decades.
The Battle of White Mountain outside the city in 1620 ended Bohemian independence for three centuries and began a period of forced re-Catholicisation — which, incidentally, is where much of the city's baroque architecture comes from.
The castle, and what counts as one
Prague Castle is generally described as the largest ancient castle complex in the world, covering around 70,000 square metres on the ridge above the Vltava's left bank.
It is less a castle in the fortress sense than a walled precinct containing a cathedral, several palaces, churches, gardens and the lane of small houses known as Golden Lane. Founded in the ninth century, it has been continuously occupied and rebuilt ever since, and it remains the seat of the Czech president.
Below it, the districts divide the city legibly: Hradčany around the castle, Malá Strana on the left bank beneath it, the Old Town across the bridge with its astronomical clock — installed in 1410 and the oldest such clock still operating — and the Jewish Quarter of Josefov, whose Old Jewish Cemetery holds burials stacked in layers because the community was not permitted to expand the ground.
Three cultures in one city
For centuries Prague was simultaneously a Czech, German and Jewish city, and the interaction between the three produced a disproportionate share of central European intellectual life.
Franz Kafka is the emblematic figure: a German-speaking Jew, born in Prague in 1883, working in Czech-administered insurance, writing in German about bureaucracies that never explain themselves. Prague's Jewish community was among the oldest in Europe, and Josefov's synagogues include the Old New Synagogue, in continuous use since the late thirteenth century and the oldest active synagogue in Europe.
That world ended. The Jewish population was almost entirely deported and murdered during the German occupation, and the German-speaking population — some hundreds of thousands across Bohemia — was expelled after 1945 under the Beneš decrees. A city that had been trilingual became monolingual within a decade.
One consequence is macabre: the Nazi authorities collected Jewish ritual objects from across Bohemia and Moravia in Prague, which is why the Jewish Museum now holds an enormous collection assembled precisely because the communities it came from were destroyed.
A river that floods
The Vltava is the Czech Republic's longest river at about 430 km, rising in the Bohemian Forest and joining the Elbe north of Prague, from where the water reaches the North Sea.
It has flooded the city repeatedly and severely. The 2002 European floods put large parts of Malá Strana, Karlín and the zoo under water, forced the metro to close for months, and caused damage across the historic centre. Flood defences built since — mobile barriers deployed at known points — were tested again in 2013 and held.
The river is also the reason the city is where it is: a crossing point on trade routes running north–south through central Europe, with a defensible ridge on one bank. Every subsequent bridge, and there are now well over a dozen, follows from that original ford.
From Velvet Revolution to overtourism
In November 1989, mass demonstrations centred on Wenceslas Square and Letná brought down the communist government within weeks, with almost no violence — the Velvet Revolution. Three years later, the country divided peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia in what became known as the Velvet Divorce.
What followed for Prague was an extremely rapid transition to a tourism economy. Visitor numbers rose from a trickle to many millions a year, concentrated in a compact historic core that was never designed for them, and the familiar consequences arrived: short-term rentals displacing residents from the centre, souvenir retail replacing ordinary shops, and stag tourism becoming enough of a problem that the city has run campaigns against it.
The city government has since restricted alcohol-fuelled night tours and moved to regulate short-term lets. It is the standard modern dilemma of a well-preserved historic capital, sharpened here by the fact that what draws the visitors is precisely the intactness that would be eroded by them. Our Czech Republic country guide covers the country beyond the capital.
