The Czech capital has been one of the most important metropolises in Europe since the reign of Charles IV in the 14th century. In its urban area, buildings from different epochs combine to form a harmonious ensemble of European cultural history.

Old town of Prague: facts

Official title:	Historic center of Prague
Cultural monument:	Old town, called Staré Mesto, among others. with the Kreuzherrenkirche, the Clementinum, the Clam-Gallas-Palais, the St. Aegidius Church, the Old Town Hall, the Teyn Church, the Old Jewish Cemetery, the Old New Synagogue, the birthplace of the poet Franz Kafka on the Old Town Square and the House of Representation as well the U Minuty house decorated with sgrafitto
Continent:	Europe
Country:	Czech Republic, Central Bohemia
Location:	Prague
Appointment:	1992
Meaning:	one of the most important cultural centers of Central Europe since the reign of Charles IV

Old town of Prague: history

870	Construction of a castle (Hradschin) on the north bank of the Vltava
1096	first attacks against Prague Jews
1235	Granting city rights
1344	Laying of the foundation stone for St. Vitus Cathedral
1346-78	Reign of Charles IV., Kings
1357	Construction of the 515 m long Charles Bridge
1389	Jewish pogrom
1475	Construction of the powder tower
1618-48	Decline of the city in the Thirty Years War
1689	Fire in the old town
1745	Due to an edict of Empress Maria Theresa, Prague becomes free of Jews
1748	Return of the Prague Jews in exchange for a paid residence permit
1905-11	Construction of the House of Representation
10/28/1918	in Prague proclamation of the Czechoslovak Republic
1993	Prague capital of the new Czech Republic

Essentially a woman

There are cities that are male and there are cities that are women. In the Czech language there is a distinction. If Prague were a man like Berlin or Rome, the place might have had a completely different fate. But Prague is essentially a woman, and for those who love Prague, she is a femme fatale. Unpredictable and unjust.

She got the beauty from the Italians, but basically thanked them for raping the city. She got her grandeur from the Germans, but she humiliated the Germans, even though they made her empress. She has the secret of the Jews, but for a long time she shyly and hesitantly confessed to the greatest of them. And for the Czechs she is nervous and ravish motherly, a being who does not want her darlings to grow up.

It is said that it bears its name after a “threshold” – “prah” – and that it is named after a withered place. You won’t find one, but you have thirsted here all too often. The place could originally have been called »braga«, and the Celts meant the plural of »brag«, the swamps in the bend of the Vltava – impenetrable, inaccessible, inaccessible. Her stone lions from the Bohemian coat of arms are still alive today – as far as the legends – at night and pull the Great Mother’s float through time. The servants, the Korbanten, get into a trance and cut bloody knife wounds while singing. And whoever this mother, the »Braga«, has put under her spell is lost. In return, as the mistress of the new green, she presents us with lush beauty, now and then also politically, as the mistress of the new green. In short, it is the “Patrona Bohemiae” – by no means the Immaculate, and yet probably always – “Sancta”. She defeats her enemies, all those who only wanted them for themselves, and turns them into stone guests.

»Tripolis Praga«, that trinity of the soul in its Czech, Jewish and German substance, is one of the most defining features of the city. History has often – and tragically – forgotten that only these three elements together breath the eternal into it. If this unity is missing, Prague has also lost: a soulless place on the threshold of the abyss. And, as is well known, history does not miss out on the abysses: all too often, golden Prague has put on a gray costume – national, German and Czech. But the Prague Germans were not enthusiastic about traditional costumes. The national excitement could not take hold of them even after the invasion of the German armed forces. They sensed what was in store for them. Because in Prague you could hear better than anywhere else when a catastrophe was approaching. Prague had resisted somehow, and that’s a fact; also when the German as well as Czech ethnophobia gripped the country. Those afflicted by this saw in the Pragers of both national tongues foreigners to whom nothing is sacred anymore. The city of women is shaped by trials and tribulations, but also by horror and suffering.

According to thesciencetutor, Golden Prague stayed gray for far too long. But at some point the people of Prague stood in the streets and beat the bells to communism with their house keys… They were happy and hoped that Prague could once again be regarded as the “mother of the cities” if one wanted to see it pan-European. But there is perhaps no other place in Europe where the disadvantages of the lost diversity of our continent are so clearly visible as here. And nowhere else can it be ascertained so quickly that every cultivated bloom, indeed every “ordo humanis”, is the result of a deliberate and understood complexity. So the Luxembourg, Rudolfine, Kakan and even the republican Prague were always symbiotic. The symbiosis has fascinated us, contradicting, intertwined, branching, stubbornly resisting all preachers of unification,

Sometimes it seems to Prague strollers, most likely on foggy autumn evenings, that this past seems more intense than the present. Really, the city does best with a touch of nostalgia. Then Prague will be, as always, the city of coexistence between Czechs, Germans and Jews, a city of two languages ​​and of enchanting beauty.