National Museum: A Palace for a Nation Without a State
Why is it significant?
Climb a few steps towards the great neo-Renaissance palace that closes the top of Wenceslas Square, and turn around. The whole avenue falls away below you, nearly 750 metres of it, and this building is the full stop at the end of the sentence. The paradox is in the date.
Key Facts
| Place | National Museum: A Palace for a Nation Without a State |
|---|---|
| Address | Václavské náměstí 68, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.07870, 14.43130 |
| Part of Walk | Wenceslas Square to the Dancing House: Prague's Century of Revolutions, 1918–1989 |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb a few steps towards the great neo-Renaissance palace that closes the top of Wenceslas Square, and turn around. The whole avenue falls away below you, nearly 750 metres of it, and this building is the full stop at the end of the sentence.
The paradox is in the date. The National Museum opened in 1891, and at that time there was no Czech state at all. Bohemia was a province of the Habsburg monarchy, German was the language of power, and Czech was something many educated families spoke mainly in the kitchen. So the patriots of the nineteenth century built a palace for a nation that existed mostly on paper... dictionaries, poems, history books, and this. Inside, under the glass dome, is a Pantheon lined with statues and busts of the great Czechs, a national hall of fame decades before there was a nation to govern.
Now look closely at the facade, around the columns and the windows. On 21 August 1968, Soviet soldiers on this square opened fire on the building with machine guns. Nobody has ever fully explained why. Some say they mistook it for the parliament or the radio; others think it was simply a show of force. The bullet scars were filled with patches of stone in a slightly different shade... and when the museum was restored, the restorers chose not to hide them.
That restoration took years. The building closed in 2011 and reopened in 2018, the hundredth anniversary of Czechoslovak independence, with the dome bright again and the Pantheon cleaned. An underground passage now links it to the glass-and-steel building next door, once the parliament of Communist Czechoslovakia and today part of the same museum.
Before you go down the square, stand still for a moment in front of the steps. Just below them, in the pavement, there is something small and bronze that most people walk straight across. Look down at your feet as you head towards the statue of the saint on horseback.