The pub density is the highest in the city and possibly in Europe, there is a television tower with bronze babies crawling up it, and almost no visitors come here.
The character
A working-class district built in the late nineteenth century outside the old walls, named after Jan Žižka, the one-eyed Hussite general who won a battle on the hill here in 1420. It was a separate town until 1922, it had a reputation for radicalism and for pubs, and it has kept both.
It has not been prettified. There are tenements, cheap rents by Prague standards, a large student and artist population, and a genuine and slightly scruffy nightlife that has nothing to do with the stag parties in the Old Town.
The tower
The Žižkov Television Tower, 216 metres, built 1985–92, is the tallest structure in the country and is regularly voted one of the ugliest buildings in the world — three concrete columns with pods stuck on them, put up in the late communist period on the site of a Jewish cemetery, part of which was cleared for it.
In 2000 David Černý attached ten enormous fibreglass babies crawling up the columns, faceless with barcode-like slots where their features should be. They were meant to be temporary. They are still there and they have made the tower loved rather than merely notorious.
There is an observation deck and a restaurant, and the view is the best 360-degree one in Prague.
The hill
Vítkov Hill carries the National Monument and one of the largest equestrian statues in the world — Jan Žižka, 9 metres of bronze on a horse.
The monument was built between the wars as a memorial to the legionaries, then used by the communists as a mausoleum for Klement Gottwald, whose embalmed body was displayed here until the embalming failed and he was cremated. It is now a museum of twentieth-century Czechoslovak history and it is excellent, and the roof terrace has a superb view.
The cemeteries
Olšany Cemetery is the largest in Prague — a vast Victorian necropolis with two million burials, including Jan Palach, the student who set himself on fire in 1969.
The New Jewish Cemetery next to it contains Franz Kafka’s grave, which is signposted, plain, and shared with his parents.
The pubs
The reason to come. Žižkov’s pub density is a genuine statistic that locals quote and the atmosphere is unlike the centre.
U Slovanské lípy for Czech craft beer done seriously.
U Vystřelenýho oka — the Shot-Out Eye, named for Žižka’s — which is scruffy, loud and much loved.
Bukowski’s for cocktails and a certain kind of gloom.
Parukářka, a hilltop park with a bunker bar and the best sunset drinking in Prague.
Riegrovy sady beer garden, on the boundary with Vinohrady, packed on any warm evening.
Next door
Vinohrady immediately south is the same distance from the centre and completely different — Art Nouveau apartment blocks, tree-lined streets, good restaurants and a professional, moneyed population. The two are worth seeing together for the contrast.
More Neighbourhoods
Malá Strana
Baroque palaces and steep lanes between the bridge and the castle, largely unchanged since 1700, and empty of people the moment you step off the main route.
Holešovice
An industrial bend in the river where Prague's contemporary art, its best market halls and a good deal of its nightlife have quietly relocated.