Palacký Bridge: The Bridge of Heroes Who Never Were

Why is it significant?

Stand at the New Town end of the bridge and look upstream. On the right bank, a dark rock rises straight out of the river with a church's twin spires on top... that is Vyšehrad, the high castle, where this walk is heading.

Key Facts

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Stand at the New Town end of the bridge and look upstream. On the right bank, a dark rock rises straight out of the river with a church's twin spires on top... that is Vyšehrad, the high castle, where this walk is heading. Now look at the bridge itself, solid and a little plain, as if something were missing. Something is. The bridge was built in the 1870s and named after František Palacký, the historian the Czechs call the Father of the Nation. His great history of the Czech people gave a small nation inside the Habsburg empire a past to be proud of. And from the late 1880s, the corners of this bridge carried four pairs of colossal sandstone statues by Josef Václav Myslbek, the greatest Czech sculptor of his age: heroes and heroines of the nation's oldest legends. Here is the irony. Two of those pairs, the warriors Záboj and Slavoj and the bard Lumír, came from medieval manuscripts that had been sensationally discovered in 1817 and 1818. They were forgeries. Brilliant ones, written to give Czech literature the ancient epic it lacked. Palacký himself defended them as genuine for decades, and the scholars who finally exposed them in the 1880s, among them a young professor called Tomáš Masaryk, were denounced as traitors. The statues stood here anyway, until 14 February 1945, when American bombs fell on this part of Prague by mistake. The bridge was hit and the statues were badly damaged. After the war, all four pairs were taken up the hill to Vyšehrad, where they still stand in the park... and you will meet them at the end of this walk. So remember the names: Libuše and Přemysl, Ctirad and Šárka, Záboj and Slavoj, Lumír and Song. Real or invented, they are the cast of the story this hill tells. Now cross the embankment road and walk up the slope to the monastery whose roof looks like two white concrete sails.