Tábor Gate: Entering the Baroque Citadel
Why is it significant?
Walk up to the thick stone gateway with its heavy arch and the brick walls running away on either side. Pass through slowly, and feel the temperature change in the shadow of the vault. You are now inside a fortress.
Key Facts
| Place | Tábor Gate: Entering the Baroque Citadel |
|---|---|
| Address | V Pevnosti, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.06170, 14.42420 |
| Part of Walk | Vyšehrad: Princess Libuše, Cubist Houses and the Nation's Cemetery in Prague |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk up to the thick stone gateway with its heavy arch and the brick walls running away on either side. Pass through slowly, and feel the temperature change in the shadow of the vault. You are now inside a fortress.
Most visitors imagine Vyšehrad as a romantic medieval castle of princesses and prophecies. But almost everything military you see around you, the walls, the bastions, the gates, is baroque, built by the Habsburgs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the Thirty Years' War, they turned the old hill into a star-shaped citadel to control Prague and guard the road along the river. This gate was built in the 1650s and named after the road that led south to the town of Tábor.
The irony of the name is sharp. Tábor was the stronghold of the radical Hussites, and in 1420 Hussite armies besieged Vyšehrad, then held by royal troops, and after a bloody battle at the foot of the hill they took it. The victors smashed and burned much of what Charles IV had built here, the churches, the royal palace, almost everything. For two centuries afterwards Vyšehrad was more a ruin and a small market town than a castle.
Just beyond this gate, look out for a few fragments of an older wall and gateway. These are the remains of Gothic fortifications, swallowed by the baroque ones like an old coin pressed into a new loaf. Vyšehrad is like that everywhere: layers of history stacked on top of each other, and legends painted over all of them.
Soldiers were garrisoned here into the early twentieth century, until the fortress lost its military role and passed to the city. Instead of guns and barracks, it got gardens, benches and children on scooters. Walk on along V Pevnosti street, through the second, more elegant gate ahead of you, and look for a small round stone church on your left.