2025 Europe – Day 24 – Prague

Thankfully the rain cleared out overnight and we woke up to a fine, cool morning. We’d organised to meet my friends at the same cafe we had breakfast at on Friday, to keep it simple. After having some nice porridge, we started our walk for the day. Our plan was to thoroughly explore the the old town and it’s square. Prague is a wonderful city to explore. There are new more beautiful buildings at every turn. The first site we reached was the Powder Gate which is a Gothic tower that is one of the thirteen original city gates. It separates the Old Town from the New Town. This route leads past the Estate Theatre until you enter the old square.

The square features buildings including the Gothic Church of Our Lady before Týn, which has been the main church of this part of the city since the 14th century. Its characteristic towers are 80 m high. The Baroque St. Nicholas Church is also located in the square. One of the main attractions is a medieval astronomical clock mounted on the Old Town Hall. The clock was first installed in 1410, making it the third-oldest astronomical clock in the world and the oldest one still in operation.

The tower of the Old Town Hall is open to the public and offers panoramic views of the Old Town and the square. Fortunately there is an elevator to the top of the tower that saved my old legs from a big climb.

By this time we were getting a bit hungry, so we identified a steakhouse for lunch. It wasn’t very authentic and if one wasn’t careful you could order some very expensive Australian meat. The ladies had truffle pasta, Jason had beef tartare and I had a lunch steak. It hit the spot and we were ready to explore the Jewish Quarter.

Jews are believed to have settled in Prague as early as the 10th century. Eventually they were concentrated within a walled Ghetto, which was largely self-governed. The ghetto was most prosperous towards the end of the 16th century. In 1850, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor allowed Jews to settle outside of the city, so the Jewish population in the ghetto decreased, leaving only Orthodox and poor Jews. Most of the quarter was demolished between 1893 and 1913 as part of an initiative to model the city on Paris. What was left were only six synagogues, the old cemetery, and the Old Jewish Town Hall, including the Spanish and Old New Synagogues.

As the day wore on, the crowds grew and crossing the Charles Bridge was a bit of a people crush. Charles Bridge is a medieval stone arch bridge that crosses the Vltava river. Its construction started in 1357 and finished in the early 15th century. It was the only means of crossing the river Vltava until 1841. The bridge is decorated by a continuous alley of 30 statues, mostly in baroque-style, originally erected around 1700, but some have now been replaced and these are lighter in colour as they have not yet oxidised.

After crossing the bridge we came to the Lennon Wall, an historic legal graffiti wall. After the 1980 murder of John Lennon a mural of Lennon was painted by an unknown artist onto the wall and as more people expanded upon it, the wall slowly became a place for free expression in then communist Czechoslovakia. It has historically been used for demonstrations and carries a central theme of John Lennon, but it also features designs relating to local and global causes such as global warming. The wall has also inspired other walls across the globe, such as the Hong Kong Lennon wall.

We rounded out our day of discovery with a river cruise, so we could sample the city from the water in the late afternoon. There were lots of other boats on the water, including some friendly welsh folks, seemingly joining the large numbers of Brits here for bucks and hens parties.

As we crossed the river to start heading back to our apartments, we walked through a few markets set up on the river to take advantage of the evening sun. We had some dinner at a riverside restaurant and savoured the sunset.

Until tomorrow