Prague Castle

The story

About 880 a duke of the Přemyslid family built a wooden fort and a small church on this ridge. In China the Tang dynasty (唐, 618–907) was in its last decades, and a rebel army was marching on the capital Chang'an.

Everything since has been built on top of that or beside it. The Czechs call the whole place simply Hrad, the Castle, and when they say "the Castle has decided" they mean the president.

Close by, with a page of its own: Charles Bridge, Hofburg, Cologne Cathedral.

What is here

A walled precinct. Walking in costs nothing. One ticket, valid for two days, covers four interiors.

If you have one minute

In the third courtyard, under the south tower

You have come through two plain courtyards that look like government offices, which they are. Then you step through an arch, and a cathedral is standing a few metres from your face, too big for the space, black and gold.

Walk round to the right until the great tower is above you. The lower part is Gothic stone, begun in the fourteenth century. Halfway up the style changes: a Renaissance gallery, then a green Baroque cap. The builders stopped in 1419 when a religious war broke out, and later centuries finished the tower in their own fashion.

The two sharp spires over the main door, which you passed, are from the nineteenth century. The church was begun in 1344 and finished in 1929. In China that runs from the last years of the Yuan dynasty (元, 1271–1368) to the Republic.

Things people often get wrong

"It is a castle." It has no keep and no great hall on a rock. It is a walled town of palaces, churches, offices and gardens. Guinness lists it as the largest ancient castle complex in the world, which depends on what you count as a castle.

"The cathedral is medieval." The eastern half is. The whole western half, with the nave, the two front spires and the rose window, was built between 1873 and 1929. The join is hard to find, which was the point.

"Alchemists lived in the Golden Lane." Castle guards did, and later goldsmiths, servants and the poor. The emperor's alchemists worked elsewhere in the Castle.

"Kafka's novel The Castle is about this place." The castle in the book stands over a snowbound village and has no name. Kafka did write in a tiny house here for one winter.

People who stood here

• Wenceslas (duke of Bohemia, about 907–935)The "good king" of the English Christmas carol was a duke, and was killed by his brother's men at a church door when he was about twenty-eight. He had founded the first church of St Vitus on this spot. He is buried in the cathedral and is the patron saint of the Czechs.
• Charles IV (king of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, 1316–1378)Raised in Paris, he came home to a castle so ruined that he had to lodge in the town. He rebuilt it, began the cathedral, founded the first university in central Europe and built the stone bridge below. Czechs voted him the greatest Czech of all time.
• Peter Parler (German master builder, about 1330–1399)He took over the cathedral at twenty-three and gave it the net-patterned vault that builders across central Europe copied. High in the choir he placed stone portraits of the royal family, the archbishops and the builders, himself among them.
• Rudolf II (Holy Roman Emperor, 1552–1612)He moved his court from Vienna to Prague in 1583 and filled the Castle with painters, clockmakers, astronomers and alchemists. He kept a lion and neglected the empire. His own brother took his crowns from him one by one.
• Johannes Kepler (German astronomer, 1571–1630)As Rudolf's court mathematician he worked out, from another man's measurements of Mars, that the planets move in ellipses. He published it in Prague in 1609. His salary was usually in arrears.
• Vilém Slavata (Bohemian governor, 1572–1652)On 23 May 1618 angry Protestant nobles threw him out of a window of the palace. He clung to the sill until someone beat his fingers with a dagger hilt. He fell some fifteen metres, lived, and wrote down every detail.
• Franz Kafka (Prague writer in German, 1883–1924)From November 1916 he came up the hill every evening after the office to write at number 22 in the Golden Lane, a house his sister had rented. He wrote most of the stories of A Country Doctor there and walked home after midnight.
• Jože Plečnik (Slovenian architect, 1872–1957)When Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 its first president asked him to turn a neglected Habsburg palace into the seat of a democracy. He spent fifteen years adding paving, stairs, a granite obelisk and gardens, all quiet and all his own.
• Alfons Mucha (Czech painter, 1860–1939)Famous in Paris for theatre posters, he came home to paint for his own nation. His window in the cathedral, finished in 1931, is painted on the glass, and glows blue at the edges and red-gold at the heart.
• Václav Havel (Czech playwright and president, 1936–2011)In January 1989 he was in prison. On 29 December he was elected president in the Vladislav Hall. He found the Castle grey and frightening, had the guards' uniforms redesigned by a film costume designer, and is said to have ridden the long corridors on a scooter.

Go deeper: eight stops, from the main gate down to the Golden Lane

The courtyards and the outside of every building are free. Stops 3, 4, 6, 7 and 8 need the Castle ticket.

1. The gate of giants

On the square outside, two stone giants on the gateposts are about to finish off their victims, one with a club and one with a dagger. Under them, in a striped box, stands a soldier of the Castle Guard. The guard changes every hour. At noon there is a band at the first-floor windows and a flag.

Look at the flagpole over the roof. If the president's flag is flying, with its lion and eagles and the words "Truth prevails", he is in the country.

2. The west front

Through the second courtyard and the arch, and you are at the main door of the cathedral. At the lower corners of the rose window, look for men in twentieth-century suits carved in the stone. They are the architects and sculptors who finished the building.

3. Inside the cathedral

The nave is 124 metres long and 33 high. Walk forward until the vault overhead becomes a net of crossing ribs. You have crossed from 1929 into the 1380s.

The third window on the left is Mucha's. At the centre a boy in red kneels beside an old woman: Wenceslas and his grandmother Ludmila, who taught him and was strangled for it. An insurance bank paid for the window, and its name is at the bottom.

In the aisle that runs round the choir is a tomb made of two tonnes of silver, with angels holding back a canopy. It belongs to John of Nepomuk, the priest thrown from the bridge below.

4. The chapel of St Wenceslas

You look in from the doorway. The lower walls are covered with more than thirteen hundred polished stones, purple amethyst and red jasper, set in gilded plaster. The saint's tomb is in the middle.

In the corner is a small door with seven locks. Behind it a stair leads to the room where the crown of Bohemia is kept. Seven people hold the seven keys, among them the president, the prime minister and the archbishop, and all seven must come together to open it. The crown is shown to the public only every few years.

5. The Golden Gate

Outside again, on the south side, is the door the kings used. Over its three arches is a mosaic of the Last Judgment made in 1371 from about a million pieces of glass. The dead climb out of their coffins on the left and are driven into fire on the right. The emperor and his wife kneel below the centre.

The same shot: stand by the granite obelisk and the whole south front fits, tower and mosaic together.

6. The hall and the window

The Old Royal Palace is the low building across the courtyard. Its great hall was finished in 1502: 62 metres long, with no pillar in it, under a stone vault whose ribs loop like flower stems. Knights jousted here on horseback, and came up by a staircase with broad shallow steps made for hooves. Czech presidents are sworn in here.

A door in the corner leads to a small room with a tiled stove. On 23 May 1618 Protestant nobles crowded into it, argued with the emperor's Catholic governors, and threw two of them and their secretary out of the window. All three lived. Catholics said the Virgin Mary had caught them. Protestants said they had landed on a dung heap. The war that followed lasted thirty years and killed millions across Europe.

7. St George's

Behind the cathedral a brick-red Baroque front hides the oldest church still standing in the Castle, founded about 920. Inside it is bare pale stone with small round arches, and very quiet. The two white towers have names. The fat one is Adam and the thin one is Eve.

8. The Golden Lane

At the bottom of the Castle a row of tiny coloured houses is built into the arches of the outer wall. They were put up from 1597 for the emperor's marksmen and their families. People lived in them until the middle of the twentieth century. Number 22, the blue one, was Kafka's.

The round tower at the end was a prison. Its first prisoner, in 1498, was a young knight called Dalibor, who had sheltered rebel peasants. The composer Bedřich Smetana made an opera of him in 1868.