Výtoň Customs House: The Last Village of the Raftsmen
Why is it significant?
Find the little house with the tall, steep roof, squeezed between the embankment, the tram tracks and the iron railway bridge. Everything around it is stone, steel and traffic, and it sits there like a grandmother at a rock concert, quietly refusing to leave.
Key Facts
| Place | Výtoň Customs House: The Last Village of the Raftsmen |
|---|---|
| Address | Rašínovo nábřeží 412, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.06780, 14.41550 |
| Part of Walk | Vyšehrad: Princess Libuše, Cubist Houses and the Nation's Cemetery in Prague |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the little house with the tall, steep roof, squeezed between the embankment, the tram tracks and the iron railway bridge. Everything around it is stone, steel and traffic, and it sits there like a grandmother at a rock concert, quietly refusing to leave.
This is the customs house of Výtoň, and it is the last building of a whole vanished world. For centuries the stretch of riverbank below Vyšehrad was Podskalí, the place under the rock: a village of raftsmen, timber merchants, ice cutters and fishermen, with low houses and yards full of stacked logs. The name Výtoň itself refers to the toll once taken here on the goods that came down the river.
And what came down the river was wood. Raftsmen tied tree trunks into long floating trains in the forests of southern Bohemia and steered them for days down the Vltava, through rapids and weirs, sleeping on the logs. At Podskalí the rafts were broken up and the timber sold to build and heat Prague. The raftsmen had their own songs, their own slang and a reputation for drinking that the whole city knew.
Around 1900, Prague decided to tame its riverbank. Stone embankments went up, the railway bridge was built, and the old houses of Podskalí were cleared almost to the last one. This toll house survived, and today it holds a small museum of the vanished village and its rafting trade. Rafting itself only died out in the twentieth century, when the great dams upstream closed the river to the timber trains.
Look up at the cliff above the tracks: the road vanishes into a tunnel cut straight through the rock of Vyšehrad at the start of the twentieth century. Before you climb the hill, though, you will meet the most avant-garde houses of their time. Walk on along the embankment towards the tunnel, then turn left into the quiet side streets climbing towards Neklanova, and watch the facades start to fold like crystals.