Wenceslas Square

What you see

Not a square but a boulevard, 750 metres long and 60 wide, sloping gently up to a domed museum. Hotels, shops, fast food and nineteenth and twentieth-century façades on both sides, and near the top, a bronze equestrian statue.

The story

Wenceslas Square is not really a square but a boulevard, seven hundred and fifty metres long and sixty wide, sloping from the National Museum down to the edge of the Old Town. It is the traditional place for demonstrations, celebrations and mass gatherings, and the stage of much of Czech modern history. Charles the Fourth founded the New Town by a decree of the eighth of March 1348, and its foundation stone was laid on the twenty-sixth of March.

The plan contained several open spaces for markets, and this one was the Horse Market, with a cattle market at today's Charles Square and a hay and grain market elsewhere. From 1362 annual fairs were held here, where not only horses but weapons and cloth were sold, and from 1877 also grain. In the early nineteenth century it still looked rural, with a stone wayside shrine in the middle, and the writer Karolina Světlá describes it in the 1830s as an unpaved space where everything was sold.

After the demolition of the Horse Gate and the city walls in 1875, the National Museum was built in the gate's place, between 1885 and 1890, to a design by Josef Schulz. Electric lighting came on the tenth of April 1895. At the top of the square stands the equestrian statue of Saint Wenceslas, and the baroque statue by Jan Jiří Bendl that stood here earlier was the focus of open-air masses, for example in 1713, during a plague epidemic, when gatherings in churches were forbidden.

On the twelfth of June 1848 the priest Jan Arnold held a mass at the statue that was the first event in Prague recorded in a daguerreotype, and it became the beginning of the June uprising. On the twenty-eighth of October 1918, at eleven in the morning, the writer Alois Jirásek and the priest Isidor Zahradník read a proclamation of an independent democratic Czechoslovakia in front of the statue, to demonstrators carrying portraits of Masaryk and Czech and American flags. Independence itself was declared in the Municipal House, but this was the public reading.

The twentieth century made the square a place of memory. On the third of July 1942 the occupiers staged a demonstration of Czech loyalty to the Reich here, attended, it was reported, by two hundred thousand people. In May 1945 several buildings near the museum were destroyed in the Prague Uprising.

On the twenty-first of August 1968, Soviet tanks and crowds filled the square. On the sixteenth of January 1969 the student Jan Palach set himself on fire here in protest against the occupation and the apathy that followed. He died three days later.

A simple cross is set into the pavement in front of the museum, unveiled in 2000, and it is easy to walk straight past. Czechs stop at it. After Palach and another young man, Jan Zajíc, died, the regime planted dense rows of thuja trees in concrete planters around the monument, so that no one could gather there in their memory, and the planters were nicknamed Štrougal's orchards.

Then came the keys. In the autumn of 1989, on Friday the twenty-fourth of November, about three hundred thousand people filled the square, jingling their keys as a symbol that the regime's time was up, which is how the Velvet Revolution sounded. The square itself has changed with the century.

Lime trees planted in 1875 gave way within twenty years to tram tracks, a horse tram ran along it from 1884, and in the First Republic it was the first place in the country with traffic lights. In 1968 an underpass was built, and in the 1960s to 1980s three metro lines were built under the area. The trams along the length of the square ended on the thirteenth of December 1980.

The lower part of the square became a pedestrian zone in April 2012. A reconstruction of the lower part ran from 2020 to 2023, based on a design competition won by the architect Jakub Cigler, and the upper part is being rebuilt, with a tram line returning to the square. Today it is full of hotels, shops, exchange offices and fast food, and the lower end is a known area for scams, so it is best used as a short stop and a place to remember.