Old Town Bridge Tower

What you see

A dark Gothic gate tower, densely carved — kings seated under canopies, saints, coats of arms, and a kingfisher motif repeated across the stonework. The east face is covered in sculpture; the west face is strikingly plain.

The story

The Old Town Bridge Tower is one of the most beautiful Gothic gates in Europe, though it was never really meant as a gate. Charles the Fourth designed it as a triumphal arch. It was meant to glorify him and his son Wenceslas the Fourth, and to be the symbolic entrance to the grandest part of Prague, because once you passed under it, the Castle appeared in front of you, with the golden mosaic of the Last Judgement shining on the cathedral gate.

The message to a dazzled traveller was: here is the glory of the Holy Roman Empire, the seat of the emperor himself. Charles also decided that the coronation processions of his successors would take this route across the new bridge. Building began soon after the bridge's foundation stone was laid in 1357.

According to Czech sources, the first builder was a master called Otto, who designed it, followed by Michael of Savoy, who took it up to the first floor, and then the imperial workshop of Peter Parler. It was finished in the 1370s and 1380s, and it stands about forty-seven metres tall on the first pier of the bridge, whose foundations include remains of the old Judith Bridge. The eastern side, facing the Old Town, is covered in sculpture, and it is meant to be read from bottom to top, in three levels.

At the lowest level are two small carved figures of human sin: an old man with a girl and a young man in the arms of an older woman. Above the arch are the coats of arms of the lands that Charles ruled, including the Holy Roman Empire, Bohemia, Moravia, Luxembourg, the Silesian duchies and Lusatia. In the middle sits the figure of Saint Vitus, standing on a tiny model of a bridge, because he is the patron of the bridge, and above him, the two enthroned kings, Charles and Wenceslas.

Charles is shown with the imperial crown and sceptre, and his old head is tilted to the right, which Czech sources explain by a serious spine injury he suffered in his youth in a jousting tournament. At the very top, in the heavenly sphere, stand Saint Adalbert and Saint Sigismund, with the Bohemian lion at their feet. Parts of the statues were once painted and gilded.

Look for the kingfisher. It was the personal emblem of Wenceslas the Fourth, and five stone kingfishers in a wreath decorate the tower, four on the Old Town side and one facing Malá Strana. A folk saying holds that only a perfectly just person can see all five at once, which is, of course, impossible.

Some scholars read astrology into the façade, with twenty-eight stone crabs on the arch for the days of the lunar month, and twenty-four above for the hours of a day, and it is said that at noon on the twenty-first of June, the summer solstice, the shadow of the lion falls briefly on the shield with the eagle of Saint Wenceslas. Under the roof, a hidden palindrome in Latin was meant to drive away demons. Then the tower became a stage for fear.

On the twenty-first of June 1621, after the defeat of the Protestant uprising, twenty-seven Czech lords were executed on Old Town Square, and the emperor ordered the heads of twelve of them to be displayed in iron baskets on poles from the tower's gallery. One skull was allowed to be taken down after a year at the request of the widow, and the other eleven remained for ten years. They were taken down in 1631, during the brief occupation of Prague by Protestant Saxon troops, and nobody knows where they were buried.

Twenty-seven white crosses in the pavement of Old Town Square remember the men. The tower was badly damaged in 1648, when the Swedes took the Castle and Malá Strana and attacked across the only bridge in Prague. The Praguers defended the gate behind a barricade of logs, with help from students and professors from the nearby Clementinum, and Swedish gunfire destroyed the Gothic sculpture on the bridge side, which was never restored.

Instead, a stone plaque with a Latin text praising the defenders was fitted in the 1650s. A thorough reconstruction took place in 1874 to 1878 under Josef Mocker. In 1972 six large statues of kings and saints were taken down and replaced with poor copies in artificial stone, and in 2006 they were replaced again with sandstone copies cut to the originals.

The original Gothic statues now stand in the Lapidarium at the Exhibition Grounds. Since 2020 the tower has been managed by Prague City Tourism.