Charles Bridge

The story

The river Vltava runs through Prague with the old town on one bank and the castle on the other. An earlier stone bridge was swept away by a flood in 1342. The king, Charles IV, ordered a new one, higher and stronger.

Work began in 1357. In China that is the seventeenth year of Zhizheng, near the end of the Yuan dynasty (元, 1271–1368); Zhu Yuanzhang, who would found the Ming (1368–1644), had taken Nanjing the year before. Chinese readers may think of the Lugou Bridge near Beijing, finished in 1192: it too is a long stone bridge with a row of carvings on each side.

Close by, with a page of its own: Prague Castle, Berlin Wall Memorial.

What is here

A public bridge with a tower at one end and two at the other.

If you have one minute

In the middle of the bridge, at the parapet

You are standing on sandstone blocks laid in the fourteenth century, ten metres wide, with the river sliding under you through arches you cannot see. Ahead is the castle on its hill. Behind you are the towers of the old town.

The saints came later. For three hundred years the bridge was bare except for one cross. The statues were put up between 1683 and 1714, when Catholic rulers had won back a country that had been largely Protestant. They face the people crossing, not the river.

Nearly all of them are copies now. The soft stone was dissolving in the rain, and the originals have been taken indoors.

Things people often get wrong

"It has always been called Charles Bridge." For five hundred years it was the Stone Bridge or the Prague Bridge. The present name dates from 1870.

"It has always been for walkers." Horse trams ran across it from 1883, electric trams from 1905, then buses and cars. Since the 1960s it has been for walkers only.

"Rubbing the bronze plaque is an old custom." The shiny patches on the base of the statue of St John come from a much newer habit than most people think. The older custom belongs to a different spot, a few steps away.

"The priest died for keeping the queen's secret." That story appeared some sixty years after his death. The records of the time show a quarrel between the king and the archbishop over who should run a rich abbey.

People who stood here

• Charles IV (king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, 1316–1378)He ordered the bridge at forty-one and did not live to cross it finished. It took about forty-five years. His statue sits on the tower at the Old Town end, and is thought to be a true likeness.
• John of Nepomuk (priest, about 1345–1393)The archbishop's deputy. On 20 March 1393 the king's men tortured him, tied him up and threw him from the bridge after dark. He was made a saint in 1729. Statues of him, with five stars round his head, stand on bridges from Portugal to Poland.
• Wenceslas IV (king of Bohemia, 1361–1419)Charles's son, who had the priest killed. He was moody, drank heavily and was twice taken prisoner by his own nobles. His statue sits on the tower beside his father's, and his badge, a kingfisher in a knotted towel, is carved all over it.
• Jiří Plachý (Jesuit priest, 1606–1664)In 1648 a Swedish army took the castle bank by surprise and tried to fight its way across. He led a company of university students who held the bridge tower for three months, until news came that the Thirty Years' War was over.
• Elias Backoffen (leader of Prague's Jewish community, 1690s)In 1696 a court found him guilty of mocking the cross on the bridge. His fine paid for the gilded Hebrew words that still hang round it.
• Matthias Braun (sculptor from Tyrol, 1684–1738)At twenty-six he carved for the bridge a blind nun to whom Christ leans down from the cross. It is usually called the finest statue here.
• Bedřich Smetana (Czech composer, 1824–1884)His tone poem Vltava (1874) follows the river from two springs in the forest to the moment it passes under this bridge. He had gone deaf a few weeks before he began it. A museum of his life stands on the bank beside the tower.
• Franz Kafka (Prague writer in German, 1883–1924)He crossed the bridge thousands of times. His earliest surviving story, Description of a Struggle, takes two men over it on a winter night.
• Marina Tsvetaeva (Russian poet, 1892–1941)An exile living in a village outside Prague, she fell in love with the stone knight who stands under the bridge and wrote him a poem in 1923. She said he looked like her.
• Brian De Palma (American film director, born 1940)In Mission: Impossible (1996) a spy is shot on the bridge at night and drops over the parapet into the river. It was one of the first big foreign films shot in Prague after 1989.

Go deeper: eight stops, from the Old Town end to the far towers

The bridge is free and never closes. Only the towers have tickets. Walk from the Old Town side towards the castle: that is the way the kings came.

1. The square before the bridge

A bronze king stands on a pedestal holding a charter. It is Charles IV, and the paper is the founding document of his university. The statue was made for the university's five-hundredth birthday in 1848.

2. The Old Town Bridge Tower

The gate to the bridge, built about 1380 by the cathedral's workshop. On the side facing you, above the arch, are three figures: the old emperor and his son seated on either side, and between them St Vitus standing on a little model of the bridge.

The far side of the tower is bare. Swedish cannon stripped it in 1648.

In 1621, after a failed rising against the Habsburgs, twenty-seven leaders were executed in the Old Town square. Twelve of their heads were hung from this tower in iron baskets and left for ten years.

You can climb it: 138 steps to a gallery under the roof.

3. The cross with Hebrew letters

Near the start, on the right, is a bronze crucifix. A cross has stood at this spot since the bridge was new. Round the figure runs an arc of gilded Hebrew letters: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts", words from the Jewish prayer book.

They were put there in 1696 to humiliate the Jews of Prague, who had to pass them every day. Small bronze plaques in Czech, English and Hebrew, added in 2000, explain this.

4. St John of Nepomuk

The oldest statue on the bridge, cast in bronze and set up in 1683. He holds a crucifix and a palm, and five gold stars ring his head: people said five stars appeared on the water where he sank.

Two reliefs on the base are worn bright by hands. On the right a tiny figure falls head first from the bridge. On the left a soldier strokes a dog while the queen kneels at confession behind him. Guides say that touching the falling priest means you will come back to Prague. Nobody can say what touching the dog does, and it is the shinier of the two.

5. The five stars in the parapet

A few steps past the statue of St John, a small brass cross with five stars is set into the top of the wall, behind an iron grille. This is where the priest went over. People lay a hand on the cross so that each finger touches a star, and make a wish.

6. The crowd of saints

Jesuits, Dominicans, the university and rich citizens each paid for a group and tried to outdo the next. Look for the blind nun on the left, about two-thirds of the way across, the Turk guarding Christian prisoners in a cave, and St Francis Xavier baptising an Indian prince on a platform carried by figures from Asia, one of them Chinese.

The originals are in a museum of stone sculpture at the exhibition grounds, and in the vaults of the old fortress of Vyšehrad.

7. The knight under the bridge

Lean over the left-hand wall where the bridge crosses an island. On a pier below stands a knight in armour with a drawn golden sword and a lion at his feet. He is Bruncvík, a prince of legend.

The island is Kampa. A narrow mill-stream called the Devil's Channel cuts it off from the bank, and an old water-wheel still turns in it.

8. The far towers and the view back

Two towers of different heights guard the castle end. The short one is older than the bridge: it belonged to the bridge that was washed away. Climb the tall one and look back. From above you see what you cannot see on the bridge: that it is not straight. It bends, probably because it was laid along the line of the older bridge.

On 4 September 1890 a flood piled thousands of logs from broken timber rafts against the piers. Three arches fell, and two statues went into the river with them. The repair took two years.

The same shot: be under the Old Town tower half an hour before sunrise. The lamps are still lit, the saints are black against the sky, and for twenty minutes the bridge is nearly empty.