Saint Vitus Cathedral

What you see

The cathedral doesn't so much stand in the courtyard as fill it — you have to tilt your head back and still can't see the top. The western towers are dense with stone tracery and gargoyles. Walk round to the south side for the older part, and the Golden Gate with its fourteenth-century mosaic of the Last Judgement.

The story

Saint Vitus Cathedral was begun in 1344 and finished in 1929, which is 585 years of building. It is the largest and most important church in the country, and it stands inside the castle, owned by the state as part of the castle complex. The place has been sacred for far longer than the Gothic walls you see.

Around the year 930, Prince Wenceslas, later Saint Wenceslas, founded a round church here and dedicated it to Saint Vitus, because he had obtained the saint's arm as a relic from the German king Henry the First. After Wenceslas was murdered, his body was brought back and buried in that rotunda, and his cult began. In 1060 Prince Spytihněv the Second started a much bigger Romanesque basilica on the spot, and a tradition grew that Czech kings should be crowned and buried where Wenceslas lay.

Until 1997 the cathedral was dedicated only to Saint Vitus. Today it is officially the cathedral of Saints Vitus, Wenceslas and Adalbert. The Gothic cathedral came from ambition.

In 1344 Prague was raised to an archbishopric, and Charles the Fourth, soon to be Holy Roman Emperor, wanted a coronation church, a family tomb and a treasury worthy of his capital. The first master builder, the Frenchman Matthias of Arras, was summoned from the papal court at Avignon. After Matthias died, the workshop was taken over by Peter Parler, a young master builder from a family of builders in Schwäbisch Gmünd, still in his twenties.

Matthias was a geometer who thought in rigid proportions. Parler was trained as a sculptor, and he treated stone as something to play with. His choir vaults are the best example: instead of simple crossing ribs he made a net of double ribs, which strengthens the roof and fills the ceiling with a lively zigzag pattern.

Among his habits was that no two of his windows have the same tracery. Look in the triforium, the narrow gallery above the arches, and you will see carved busts of members of the royal family, saints, bishops of Prague and the two master builders, including Parler himself, looking down from the wall. The most precious room is the Saint Wenceslas Chapel, built over the saint's grave.

It is almost a perfect cube, and Parler covered it with a star-shaped vault whose supports are moved from the corners of the room to the thirds of the walls, a radical idea at the time. The walls are encrusted with more than thirteen hundred polished semi-precious stones, framing painted scenes from the saint's life. Next to the chapel, above the south porch, is the Crown Chamber.

The Bohemian Crown Jewels are kept there behind a door with seven locks. The seven keys are held by seven different people: the president, the prime minister, the archbishop, the speakers of both houses of parliament, the mayor of Prague and the dean of the cathedral. All seven must be present to open the door.

The jewels are shown to the public only on rare occasions. Then the work stopped. Parler died in 1399, his sons carried on for a while, and then the Hussite wars wiped out the workshop and destroyed furnishings and statues.

Interest faded, and the story goes that the builders closed the site off with a wall of planks, leaving the cathedral a half-finished fragment. For most of the next five hundred years, the great choir stood with a stub of a nave. Only in the nineteenth century, with the Czech national revival, did the Union for the Completion of the Cathedral get the work started again, from 1873.

The nave and the west front you see today are a careful imitation of the medieval style, and the cathedral was officially finished in 1929, in time for the Saint Wenceslas jubilee of that year. So when you walk round the building, you are looking at two cathedrals, one from the fourteenth century and one from the twentieth, and the seam between them is the story of Czech history. Stand back and tip your head up.

The cathedral is 124 metres long and 60 metres wide. The main tower rises about 103 metres, and the two front towers stand 82 metres tall. The cathedral began on the twenty-first of November 1344, under King John of Bohemia, with strong backing from his son Charles the Fourth.

The Saint Wenceslas Chapel was built between 1356 and 1364. Walk round to the south side and look for the Golden Gate. It was commissioned by Charles the Fourth, and its glittering mosaic of the Last Judgement was made in the 1370s by Venetian craftsmen.

The nave was completed only in the twentieth century, and in the 1920s some of the best-known Czech artists of the day worked here. The painter Alfons Mucha designed a window in the northern part of the nave, and František Kysela designed the rose window, finished between 1925 and 1927, showing scenes from the biblical story of creation. The cathedral also holds the tombs of Bohemian kings and Holy Roman Emperors.