Six hundred years under construction and finished in 1929, with a Mucha window, the Bohemian crown jewels behind seven locks, and Wenceslas's chapel.
Six hundred years
Charles IV began it in 1344 on the site of a Romanesque rotunda, hiring Matthias of Arras and then, after his death, the 23-year-old Peter Parler, who did most of what matters. Parler’s net vaulting in the choir was structurally and aesthetically ahead of anything in Europe, and his gallery of 21 carved busts in the triforium — including himself and his patrons, sculpted from life — is one of the earliest sets of realistic portraits in medieval art.
Then the Hussite wars stopped it, and it stood half-built for four hundred years with a temporary wall. The nave, the west front and the twin towers were only completed between 1873 and 1929.
So the building is genuinely Gothic at one end and a careful nineteenth-century continuation at the other, and you can see the join.
What to find inside
The Mucha window in the third chapel on the north side. Alphonse Mucha designed it in 1931, and unlike traditional stained glass — coloured pieces leaded together — it is largely painted on glass, which gives it the soft graduated colour of his posters. It depicts Saints Cyril and Methodius. It is entirely unlike everything around it and it is the thing people remember.
St Wenceslas Chapel, built by Parler over the saint’s tomb, with walls set with 1,300 pieces of polished jasper and amethyst and a fourteenth-century painting cycle. You cannot go in — you look through the doorway — and it is the most beautiful room in the country.
A door in its corner, with seven locks whose keys are held by seven different people, leads to the chamber holding the Bohemian crown jewels. They are displayed roughly once a decade. The crown of St Wenceslas carries a legend that any usurper who wears it will die within a year; Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi governor, is said to have tried it on, and was assassinated the following year.
The tomb of St John of Nepomuk, two tonnes of solid silver.
The royal crypt below, with Charles IV and other Bohemian kings.
The tower
297 steps up the Great South Tower, no lift, and the best view over the castle and the city. It is a separate small ticket and it is worth it if you have the legs.
Practical
The cathedral is inside the castle complex, so you pass through the castle security check to reach it.
A short free section of the nave is accessible without a ticket, and it gives you the scale and the west rose window and nothing else.
It is a working cathedral. Services close parts of it, and Sunday mornings are worship rather than sightseeing.
Photography without flash is permitted; a small photo permit is sometimes required for the castle circuit.
More History
Josefov, the Jewish Quarter
Six synagogues, a cemetery with twelve layers of graves, and a collection that exists because the Nazis intended to make a museum of an exterminated people.
Vyšehrad
A fortress on a rock above the Vltava, older than the castle in legend and younger in fact, with the national cemetery and almost no tourists.
Strahov Monastery Library
Two baroque library halls of painted ceilings and gilded shelving, and a cabinet of curiosities including two whale penises and a narwhal tusk sold as a unicorn horn.