Old Town Hall & the Astronomical Clock

What you see

A Gothic tower with, on its south wall, two large painted and gilded dials stacked one above the other — the upper one dense with rings, hands and symbols, the lower a circle of twelve rural scenes. Beside them, carved figures: a skeleton holding an hourglass, a man with a mirror, a miser with a purse.

The story

The Old Town Hall began in 1338, when King John of Luxembourg gave the burghers of the Old Town permission to build a town hall. They bought the patrician house of Wolflin of Kámen, and next to it, on older foundations, they began a tower. By 1381 the tower had a chapel, in 1402 a clock was recorded on it, in 1409 a bell, and the walkway at the top was finished only between 1805 and 1807.

A neo-Gothic wing was added in 1838 to 1848. And on the south wall of the tower, the thing everybody comes to see: the astronomical clock, the Orloj. The first documentary evidence for it is a charter of the ninth of October 1410, preserved in a copy.

The mechanism and the astronomical dial were made then by the clockmaker Mikuláš of Kadaň, probably to a design by Jan Šindel, a professor of philosophy, mathematics and astronomy and a rector of the university. The oldest part may be older still: the frame of the striking mechanism seems to date from the 1360s, and a fire in 1399 destroyed the tower's earlier clock. Another clock in Padua, from 1344, may have been an inspiration.

The sculpture closest to the dial comes from the stonemasons of Peter Parler, and the rich decoration around it from the time of King Vladislav Jagiellon, at the end of the fifteenth century. Today the Orloj is the third oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest one still working. It is much more than a clock.

The central dial is based on an astrolabe, and on it you can read four different kinds of time: Central European time, sidereal time, so-called Babylonian or natural time, and, most strikingly, Old Czech time on the gold ring of twenty-four hours. It also shows the rising, culmination and setting of the Sun, the Moon and the signs of the zodiac, the phases of the Moon and the Moon's position in relation to the Sun, and dawn and dusk. The calendar dial underneath, a work of the painter Josef Mánes from 1866, shows the month, the day and the fixed Christian feasts.

Everyone has heard of Hanuš. The legend says the clockmaker Hanuš was blinded on the orders of the city councillors, so that he could never build anything similar, and that in revenge he climbed the tower and sabotaged his own clock. It is a wonderful story, but the facts are different.

The legend appears in chronicles as early as the sixteenth century and became famous through the novels of Alois Jirásek. For a long time it was believed that the clock had been made in 1490 by a clockmaker named Jan Růže, called Hanuš. In 1962 a lawyer, Stanislav Macháček, found a book of the clockmakers with a copy of a German letter of 1410, in which the town hall thanks Mikuláš of Kadaň for his good work, in contrast to his predecessor, describes the clock briefly but accurately, and rewards the clockmaker with a house and a large yearly pay.

The astronomer Zdeněk Horský then showed that the Hanuš story was a mistake, caused by a misreading of the records. Hanuš really existed and worked on the clock in 1490, but he improved it eighty years after it was built. The clock's life has been difficult.

In the eighteenth century it was in such a critical state that Prague's council considered selling it as scrap, and it was saved by a patriotic professor and meteorologist, Antonín Strnad, who persuaded the council to pay for a repair of seven hundred and ninety-three gulden, carried out between 1787 and 1791 by the clockmaker Šimon Landsperger. Not long after, the figures of the apostles were probably added. In 1865 and 1866 the astronomical functions were put back into operation, and the sounding rooster was added.

On the eighth of May 1945, during the Prague Uprising, a shell set the town hall on fire. The brick wall protected the mechanism, but the wooden structure supporting the apostles burned, and there was talk of replacing the clock with a modern one. Thanks to the efforts of the brothers Vesecký, it was running again in 1948, although the coloured horizons on the astronomical dial were painted wrongly in that repair, so for decades the clock misrepresented the transition between night and dawn.

Now the show. Every hour little windows above the dial slide open and twelve apostle figures pass by. Beside the dial, look at the carved figures: one admires himself in a mirror, which is Vanity, one holds a bag of gold, which is Greed, a third is a Turkish figure, and a skeleton, Death, tugs a bell rope to signal the hour.

The show is short, about a minute, so if the crowd is thick, do not worry: you can look at the clock at any other time of the hour. The apostles were restored after the war by the sculptor Vojtěch Sucharda. The most recent renovation took place between January and September 2018.

It replaced an electric mechanism from 1948 with the original machinery from the 1860s.