Štefánik Observatory & the Rose Garden

Why is it significant?

You have reached the flat top of the hill. On one side of the path, rose beds laid out in neat geometric patterns, heavy with scent in June. On the other side, two white domes with narrow slits, waiting for the night. It is hard to think of two neighbours with more different ideas of beauty.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You have reached the flat top of the hill. On one side of the path, rose beds laid out in neat geometric patterns, heavy with scent in June. On the other side, two white domes with narrow slits, waiting for the night. It is hard to think of two neighbours with more different ideas of beauty.

The Štefánik Observatory opened in 1928, ten years after Czechoslovakia was born, and it carries the name of a remarkable man. Milan Rastislav Štefánik was a Slovak astronomer who worked at the observatory on top of Mont Blanc and travelled as far as Tahiti for his science. In the First World War he became a general in the French army and, with Masaryk and Beneš, one of the three founders of Czechoslovakia. In May 1919, flying home, his plane crashed near Bratislava. He was thirty-eight.

This was never meant to be a scientist's ivory tower. It was built by the Czech Astronomical Society, founded in 1917 by enthusiasts who wanted ordinary people to be able to look through a proper telescope. And that is still what happens here. On a clear evening you may find yourself in a queue of schoolchildren, pensioners and a couple on a date, all waiting their turn at the eyepiece to see the craters of the Moon or the rings of Saturn, right in the middle of a capital city.

The rose garden came a few years later, in the 1930s, and it is a much more earthbound pleasure. Walk between the beds and notice how the hill flattens out up here: this is the summit plateau, more than three hundred metres above sea level and well over a hundred metres above the river. And behind the roses runs an old battlemented stone wall. You will meet it properly later. It is six centuries older than the roses and the telescopes put together.

Now follow the broad path north along the ridge, past the upper station of the funicular. Ahead of you, through the trees, a steel tower is already showing its top... and anyone who has ever been to Paris will feel a strange sense of déjà vu.