Prague Castle is on a low hill overlooking the city. It claims to be “the largest coherent castle complex in the world,” with an area of almost 70,000 m². When I was there in 2011 they offered two types of admission tickets, the “long visit” and the “short visit”. I took Read More …
The second Prague defenestration took place here in the Old Royal Palace in the year 1618, when a group of angry Protestants bribed their way into the castle and threw two high Catholic officials and their secretary out of a third-story window. This bizarre incident had far-reaching consequences, since it Read More …
Before visiting his cathedral, all I knew about St. Vitus was that there is a disease named after him, St. Vitus dance, otherwise known as Sydenham chorea, in which the patient makes jerky movements that look vaguely like some sort of dance. It turns out that St. Vitus dance is Read More …
Visitors with tickets for “Circuit A” of the Prague Castle can also go into the Rosenberg Palace, which was originally built as a Renaissance palace for the aristocratic Rosenberg family. In the eighteenth century it was rebuilt in Baroque style. Starting in 1756 it was used as a “residence for Read More …
Next door to the Rosenberg Palace is another palace which strictly speaking is not a part of Prague Castle, because it is again (after two interruptions) the private property of the Lobkowicz family, an aristocratic family which has “played a prominent role in Central European history for over six hundred Read More …
In April 2011, I took an InterCityExpress (ICE) train from Frankfurt to Nürnberg and changed there for an ALEX train to Prague, leaving Nürnberg at 14:05 and arriving Prague at 18:54. ALEX is a private railroad company that belongs to Netintera, which in turn is now (since December 2020) a Read More …
When I was in Prague there were two companies, City Bike and Praha Bikes, which offered guided bicycle tours of the city. Both companies made a friendly and competent impression when I visited them. Their tours sounded quite similar. The tours at City Bike were a tick more expensive but Read More …
One of the few words I learned in Czech was Národní, meaning national, since there are lots of “national” things in Prague. As a non-nationalist I am not terribly enthusiastic about this. I tend to agree with Karl W. Deutsch (1912-1992), who was born in Prague and studied here until Read More …
On National Street (Národní ulice) near the National Theater (Národní divadlo) there is an ugly parking lot with an interesting mural behind it, showing tanks and bulldozers chasing each other along an endless strip of the type known as a Möbius strip (named after one its discoverers, the German mathematician Read More …
This little metal square is mounted in the sidewalk in front of house number 14 in the street called Králodvorská in Prague. It says that a woman named Markéta Auerbachová, born 1907, used to live here until she was deported to a Nazi concentration camp in 1941. These symbolic stumbling Read More …