A medieval square that survived everything, with a 600-year-old astronomical clock whose hourly show is, by common agreement, the most overrated forty seconds in Europe.
The square
Prague’s fortune is that it was not bombed. The Old Town Square is a working medieval square with buildings from the Gothic through to Art Nouveau standing next to each other, and the reason it looks like that is that the twentieth century mostly happened elsewhere.
The exception is the north wing of the Old Town Hall, destroyed by German artillery on 8 May 1945 in the last days of the war and never rebuilt — the gap on that side is deliberate.
In the pavement in front of the town hall are 27 crosses, marking the execution of 27 Protestant leaders in 1621 after the Battle of White Mountain. Their heads were displayed on the bridge tower for ten years.
The Jan Hus memorial in the centre commemorates the reformer burned at the stake in 1415, a century before Luther, and unveiled on the 500th anniversary in 1915 when such a gesture was pointedly anti-Habsburg.
The astronomical clock
Installed in 1410, which makes it the oldest astronomical clock still operating.
Everybody watches the hourly show and almost everybody is disappointed. Two windows open, the twelve apostles process past, a skeleton rings a bell and turns an hourglass, a cockerel crows, and it is over in under a minute. The crowd disperses looking at each other.
The clock itself is the interesting part and nobody reads it. The upper dial shows the position of the sun and moon in the zodiac, Old Bohemian time, Babylonian time and Central European time simultaneously. The lower dial is a calendar with the months as agricultural scenes, painted by Josef Mánes in 1866.
The figures beside the dials are moralised: Vanity with a mirror, Greed with a purse, Death as the skeleton, and — as originally conceived — the Turk. That last one is a fifteenth-century European anxiety carved into a clock face and left there.
The tower
Climb it. There is a lift as well as a spiral ramp, the ticket includes the medieval interiors and the chapel, and the gallery gives the best view of the square, the Týn church and the roofs of the Old Town. It is the thing to do here rather than watching the clock.
Around the square
Týn Church, with its two asymmetric Gothic spires, is the building on the postcards. The entrance is through a passage under the houses in front of it, which almost nobody finds. Tycho Brahe is buried inside.
St Nicholas Church on the north side, baroque and often used for concerts.
The Kinský Palace and the House at the Stone Bell hold National Gallery collections.
Practical
The square is free and always open. It has a Christmas market from late November and an Easter one, both good and both very busy.
Avoid the restaurants directly on the square — they are priced for people who will not return, and the mark-up is substantial. Two streets in any direction is a different city.
Watch for currency exchange booths advertising zero commission near here; the rate is where they make the money. Use an ATM attached to a bank instead.
More Landmarks
Charles Bridge
A fourteenth-century stone bridge with thirty baroque statues, begun at 5.31am on the ninth of July 1357 because the numbers made a palindrome.
Prague Castle
The largest ancient castle complex in the world by area — a walled district of palaces, a cathedral, a monastery and a lane of tiny houses, not a single building.