Nový Svět Lane

Why is it significant?

Walk slowly down Nový Svět, the New World, a crooked lane of low, brightly painted houses with tiled roofs and little windows. No shops, no crowds, a cobbled gutter, a lamp on a bracket... It is hard to believe that the castle, with its endless stream of visitors, is only a few hundred metres away.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk slowly down Nový Svět, the New World, a crooked lane of low, brightly painted houses with tiled roofs and little windows. No shops, no crowds, a cobbled gutter, a lamp on a bracket... It is hard to believe that the castle, with its endless stream of visitors, is only a few hundred metres away.

This was a poor quarter, settled in the fourteenth century just outside the walls, where castle servants, craftsmen and labourers lived. After the great fire of 1541 swept through Hradčany and the Lesser Town, the cottages were rebuilt, and many still carry their old house signs. Look for the Golden Pear and its golden cousins: some of the humblest houses in Prague were given some of its grandest names.

Around 1600 the lane is said to have had a famous resident. Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who came to Prague to serve Emperor Rudolf the Second, lived up here for a while, according to tradition. The story goes that he could not bear the bells of the Capuchin monastery next door, which disturbed his observations and his sleep, and that the emperor, who adored his astronomers, had them silenced.

What happened in Rudolf's Prague over the next few years changed how we see the sky. Tycho had collected the most precise planetary observations ever made without a telescope. In 1600 a young German mathematician, Johannes Kepler, joined him. Tycho died suddenly in 1601, and Kepler, working in Prague with Tycho's data, showed that the planets move not in circles but in ellipses. In a sense, the solar system got its true shape a short walk from this lane.

Tycho's death itself became a legend: that politeness kept him at a banquet table too long and his bladder burst. In 2010 scientists opened his tomb in the Týn Church and found no evidence that he had been poisoned with mercury, as some had suspected. Now walk to the end of the lane and head east, towards the Powder Bridge, the road that leads to the castle's northern gate. Our last stop lies below that road, in a green ravine where an emperor kept his animals.