The Hunger Wall
Why is it significant?
Walk alongside the wall for a while and run your hand over the stone: rough blocks of Petřín marl, crowned with square battlements like a row of teeth.
Key Facts
| Place | The Hunger Wall |
|---|---|
| Address | Hladová zeď, Petřínské sady, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08450, 14.38930 |
| Part of Walk | Prague's Green Hill: Petřín Orchards, the Hunger Wall & Strahov's Painted Libraries |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk alongside the wall for a while and run your hand over the stone: rough blocks of Petřín marl, crowned with square battlements like a row of teeth. It comes from Strahov just ahead of you, runs back along the ridge past the lookout tower, then drops all the way down the slope to Újezd, where this walk began.
This is the Hunger Wall, Hladová zeď, built in the early 1360s on the orders of Emperor Charles IV. It was a serious piece of military engineering. It closed off the Lesser Town and the castle district on their western side, the side where an enemy could come over the hill, and it is more than a kilometre long. Charles was building Prague into one of the great capitals of Europe, and this wall was part of the armour.
And the name? The famous story says that a famine struck Prague, and the emperor, instead of handing out alms, gave the hungry poor paid work building this wall... bread for stones. It is a lovely tale of a wise king, and Praguers still tell it. But there is no solid contemporary evidence for it, and many historians treat it as a legend that grew up later around a name nobody could quite explain.
The wall's military career was short. Within a couple of centuries gunpowder had made walls like this old-fashioned, and it became more a boundary than a defence. It still is one. On your side, the wooded slope of Petřín. On the far side, out of sight, lies the vast Strahov Stadium, built between the wars for the mass gymnastic displays of the Sokol movement, when thousands of people moved in perfect unison on the grass.
Notice how much life clings to the old stone: moss on the north face, ivy, wildflowers in the joints, and birds perching on the battlements. Six hundred years of weather have turned a fortification into a habitat. Keep the wall on your left and follow it until it meets the gardens of a monastery. Two white towers will appear ahead... the monks behind them have been collecting books for almost nine hundred years.