Old Town Square

What you see

A wide open square with no traffic, ringed by façades in every colour and every style — Gothic gables, baroque curves, pastel Renaissance fronts — and in the middle, a brooding dark bronze monument of a standing figure surrounded by crouching ones.

The story

Old Town Square is the stage where most of Czech history has been acted out. It covers a little over nine thousand square metres, and for centuries it was simply the market place. Czech sources say there was a market here as early as the eleventh century, and by 1211 an official was recorded as collecting fees on it.

In the thirteenth century it was called the Old Market, in the fourteenth the Old Town Ring, and it got its present official name only in 1895, although everybody today calls it Staromák. In 1338 King John of Luxembourg allowed the Old Town to build a town hall here, and the square became the centre of the city's government, with the houses around it standing on Romanesque and Gothic foundations under their Renaissance and baroque faces. The darkest day came on the twenty-first of June 1621.

After the defeat of the Bohemian Revolt, twenty-seven leaders of the rebellion were executed here, in front of the town hall, on a scaffold built for the occasion. Three of them were nobles, seven were knights and seventeen were burghers. Twenty-seven white crosses in the pavement near the tower mark the spot, and a plaque with the names on the wall dates from 1911.

In 2011 an art group added a twenty-eighth cross, which was removed a few days later. If you look along the same stretch of pavement, you will find a long brass line, the Prague Meridian, which marked where the shadow of the Marian column fell at local noon. The column was put up in 1650 after the Thirty Years' War, and on the third of November 1918, a few days after independence, a crowd pulled it down as a symbol of Habsburg power.

It stood in memory of the end of the war, and a replica by the sculptor Petr Váňa was put up again on the fourth of June 2020, after decades of public argument. Look at the century of events since. A neo-Gothic extension was added to the Old Town Hall in 1838 to 1848.

In the late nineteenth century trams began to run across the square, and in 1902 people demonstrated here for universal suffrage. In 1915, the monument to Jan Hus was unveiled to mark five hundred years since his death. On the fourteenth of October 1918 a demonstration here demanded independence from Austria-Hungary.

In the Prague Uprising of May 1945, part of the town hall was heavily damaged and later pulled down, which uncovered the back sides of some houses, and the plan to rebuild it never succeeded. Then there is the Communist period. On the twenty-first of February 1948, Klement Gottwald spoke to a rally from the balcony of the Kinský Palace, and later, probably by mistake, a photograph of that balcony became linked with his famous speech of the twenty-fifth of February, which actually took place from the back of a lorry on Wenceslas Square.

The mistake stuck, and many people still repeat it. On the seventh of November 1962 a homemade bomb went off during an official celebration of the Russian revolution, injuring two people badly, and the press kept silent about it. In 1966 the tram line was removed and the square became a pedestrian zone, and the whole area was repaved in 1987 and 1988.

On the second of June 1990 a bomb exploded on the base of the Hus monument and injured eighteen people, and nobody knows who did it. The same space still holds markets, Christmas fairs and celebrations, and it was a gathering point in November 1989. When you stand on the pavement near the crosses, it is worth remembering how many different Prague crowds have stood on exactly these cobbles: market sellers, revolutionaries, rally-goers, and now tourists waiting for the clock to strike.

Turn slowly in a circle. The two dark Gothic towers belong to the Church of Our Lady before Týn, and each is about eighty metres tall. The Old Town Hall has a tower you can climb for a panoramic view, and its famous astronomical clock.

Look for the baroque church of Saint Nicholas, the pink Kinský Palace, which houses part of the National Gallery, and beside it the House at the Stone Bell, a Gothic house of the fourteenth century. The big monument in the middle is the memorial to Jan Hus, the reformer who was burned at the stake in Constance and who for many Czechs remains a symbol of conscience. The restaurants right on the square are known as tourist traps, so it is often better to step into a side street for lunch.

Before you go, look slowly at each façade, the Gothic, the baroque and the later buildings between them. Almost every century of Prague history has left a layer here.