Bohemia's Vltava capital of castles and Beta+ buzz
Prague—Praha—is the Czech Republic's capital and largest city, historic capital of Bohemia on the Vltava. Romanesque to Baroque layers housed Bohemian kings and Holy Roman emperors. Castle, Charles Bridge, Old Town clock, Jewish Quarter, and Petřín draw more than 8.5 million visitors as of 2017; GaWC calls it Beta+.
People lived here in the Paleolithic, and in the fifth or fourth century BC Celtic Boii settled the region, building the great oppidum of Zavist to the south and giving Bohemia its name, before Germanic tribes displaced them. Slavs arrived probably in the sixth century AD. Cosmas of Prague's twelfth-century chronicle linked the name Praha to a word for threshold, while the scholar Josef Dobrovsky argued it meant a ford or rapid. Legend credits the prophetess Libuse, gazing from Vysehrad over the Vltava, with foreseeing a city whose glory would touch the stars.
Work on Prague Castle began late in the ninth century on a site fortified since 800, with its oldest masonry dating to 885 at the latest. Boleslaus II won the city a bishopric in 973, and the traveller Abraham ben Jacob described Jewish and other merchants trading here in 965; the Old New Synagogue of 1270 still stands. Vladislaus I built the Judith Bridge in 1170, which a flood swept away in 1342, and Ottokar II founded the German-run Lesser Quarter in 1257. Archaeological layers run more than ten metres deep.
Under Charles IV, from 1346 to 1378, Prague became an imperial capital. He designed the New Town himself, built the Charles Bridge and in 1347 founded Charles University, while his father John had begun St Vitus Cathedral in 1344, the year Prague became an archbishopric. The Hunger Wall, built during a famine in the 1360s, reputedly gave workers food and wages. After his death, an Easter 1389 pogrom destroyed the Jewish quarter. Jan Hus preached reform at the Bethlehem Chapel from 1402 and was burned at Constance; four years later the first defenestration launched the Hussite Wars, and Jan Zizka's forces beat Emperor Sigismund at Vitkov Hill in 1420.
Today around 1.4 million people live in the city, the EU's twelfth largest. Bolzano counted a hundred spires, though officials now estimate 500, and in 2017 over 8.5 million foreign visitors made it Europe's fifth most visited city.
Source: Prague
