Timeline of Prague

Prague Castle is founded. The Přemyslid dukes fortify a bluff above a ford on the Vltava. The castle has been the seat of power in Bohemia continuously ever since — dukes, kings, emperors, presidents — which is a claim few sites in Europe can make.

Wenceslas is murdered. Duke Václav is killed at Stará Boleslav on the orders of his brother Boleslav. He becomes the patron saint of Bohemia, the subject of an English Christmas carol, and the name of the square where every Czech political crisis since has played out.

Ibrahim ibn Yaqub describes the market. A Sephardic Jewish merchant and diplomat from Córdoba visits and leaves the first outside description of Prague: a town of stone and lime, and the richest trading place in the region. Slaves, furs and tin.

Bohemia becomes a kingdom. Vratislav II is crowned the first King of Bohemia, though the title is initially personal rather than hereditary. It becomes permanent in 1198.

Malá Strana is founded. Přemysl Otakar II establishes a town below the castle, settled largely with German colonists. It burns in 1541 and is rebuilt in baroque, which is why it looks the way it does.

The Přemyslid line ends. Wenceslas III is assassinated in Olomouc without a male heir, ending four centuries of the dynasty. The crown passes eventually to John of Luxembourg, whose son changes everything.

St Vitus Cathedral is begun. Charles raises Prague to an archbishopric and begins a cathedral, hiring Matthias of Arras and then the 23-year-old Peter Parler. It is finished in 1929.

Charles University and the New Town. Charles IV founds the first university north of the Alps and east of Paris, and lays out the New Town — a planned extension three times the size of the old city, with street widths that still work.

Charles Bridge is begun. The foundation stone is laid at 5.31am on a date chosen by astrologers to read as a palindrome: 1357, 9 July, 5.31. The bridge is still standing and still carrying people.

Jan Hus is burned at the stake. The preacher and university rector, summoned to the Council of Constance under an imperial safe conduct, is convicted of heresy and burned. Bohemia rises, and the Hussite wars follow — a Czech Reformation a century before Luther.

The First Defenestration. A Hussite crowd throws seven Catholic councillors from the windows of the New Town Hall. Those who survive the fall are killed in the street. The Hussite Wars begin.

Rudolf II moves the court to Prague. The Habsburg emperor makes Prague the imperial capital and fills it with astronomers, artists and alchemists. Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler both work here, and Kepler derives his laws of planetary motion from Brahe’s Prague observations.

The Second Defenestration. Protestant nobles throw two imperial governors and their secretary from a window of Prague Castle. All three survive — Catholics credit angels, Protestants a dung heap. The Thirty Years’ War begins.

The Battle of White Mountain. The Bohemian revolt is destroyed in about two hours on a hill west of the city. Twenty-seven leaders are executed in the Old Town Square the following June; the crosses are set in the pavement. Bohemia is re-Catholicised and ruled from Vienna for three centuries.

The Swedes reach Charles Bridge. In the last action of the Thirty Years’ War, a Swedish army takes Malá Strana and loots the castle, and is held at the bridge by students and townspeople. The Old Town Bridge Tower still carries the damage.

The four towns become one city. Joseph II merges the Old Town, the New Town, Malá Strana and Hradčany into a single administrative city.

Don Giovanni premieres. Mozart conducts the first performance at the Estates Theatre, having written parts of it in Prague. The theatre still stands and still stages it.

Revolution, and the Slavic Congress. Prague rises with the rest of Europe. The revolt is put down by artillery from Petřín, but the Czech National Revival — language, theatre, history — is now a political movement rather than a scholarly one.

The National Theatre reopens. Built by public subscription as a statement that Czech was a language worth a theatre, opened in 1881, burned down six weeks later, and rebuilt by a second subscription raised in forty-five days. Its motto reads: the nation to itself.

The Jewish Quarter is demolished. A slum clearance removes almost all of the medieval ghetto, sparing six synagogues, the cemetery and the town hall. What replaces it is the Art Nouveau of Pařížská, now the most expensive street in the country.

Czechoslovakia is founded. The empire collapses and an independent republic is declared, with Tomáš Masaryk as president. Within twenty years it is among the ten most industrialised economies in the world and the only functioning democracy left in central Europe.

The Munich Agreement. Britain, France, Germany and Italy agree to hand the Sudetenland to Germany. Czechoslovakia is not present at the negotiation. In Czech it is remembered as the Munich Betrayal, and it shaped Czech attitudes to great-power guarantees for a century.

The occupation. German troops enter Prague and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia is declared. Universities are closed after student protests in November; nine students are executed and over a thousand sent to camps.

Terezín becomes a ghetto. The garrison town north of Prague is turned into a ghetto and transit camp. Around 150,000 Jews pass through; 33,000 die there and most of the rest are deported onward to Auschwitz. Fewer than 250 of the roughly 15,000 children survive.

Heydrich is assassinated. Czechoslovak paratroopers attack Reinhard Heydrich in Prague; he dies of his wounds. The reprisals destroy Lidice and Ležáky entirely and kill thousands. The paratroopers die in a siege at the church on Resslova, where the bullet marks are still in the wall.

The Prague Uprising. The city rises against the occupation days before the war ends. Around 1,700 Czechs are killed and the north wing of the Old Town Hall is destroyed by artillery — the gap on that side of the square is deliberate.

The communist coup. The Communist Party, which had won 38 per cent in a free election two years earlier, takes complete power. Jan Masaryk, the foreign minister and son of the founding president, is found dead below his bathroom window two weeks later.

The Slánský trial. The party’s own general secretary and ten others are hanged after a show trial with an explicit antisemitic character. Their ashes are scattered on an icy road outside Prague.

The Stalin monument is unveiled. The largest statue of Stalin ever built, 15.5 metres, goes up on Letná two years after his death and a year before Khrushchev denounces him. Praguers nickname it the meat queue. It is blown up in 1962.

The Warsaw Pact invasion. Around half a million troops end the Prague Spring. The army is ordered not to resist; the population removes street signs, argues with tank crews and broadcasts from hiding. About 137 people are killed.

Jan Palach. A twenty-year-old student sets himself on fire at the top of Wenceslas Square, in protest not at the invasion but at the resignation that followed it. He dies three days later. A cross is set in the pavement where he fell.

Charter 77. A few hundred people sign a document asking the state to observe its own laws. The signatories, including Václav Havel, are arrested, harassed and barred from work. Havel spends nearly five years in prison.

Národní třída. Riot police attack a student march on Národní. A false rumour that a student has been killed turns it into a general movement, and the government falls within eleven days.

Three-quarters of a million on Letná. The largest gathering in Czechoslovak history. Alexander Dubček appears in public for the first time in twenty years, alongside Havel. A general strike two days later ends the government’s position.

Havel is elected president. A playwright who had been in prison earlier the same year is elected head of state by the federal assembly. Nobody was killed in the whole sequence, which is why it is called the Velvet Revolution.

The Velvet Divorce. Czechoslovakia separates into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, peacefully and by parliamentary agreement, without a referendum and with polls suggesting most people in both countries would have preferred to stay together.

The great flood. The Vltava reaches levels not seen for five centuries. Kampa, Karlín and Holešovice go under, the metro is flooded, and 50,000 people are evacuated. The high-water marks are still on the walls.

EU accession. Czechia joins the European Union, and Schengen follows in 2007. Low-cost airlines arrive, and Prague’s visitor numbers begin the climb that now defines the historic centre.