Bethlehem Chapel: Jan Hus and the Birth of the Háček
Why is it significant?
Walk into the small, quiet square and face the white building with two steep, pointed gables side by side. It looks medieval, and it is... and it is also younger than many of the people walking past it. Both are true, and that is the story.
Key Facts
| Place | Bethlehem Chapel: Jan Hus and the Birth of the Háček |
|---|---|
| Address | Betlémské nám. 255/4, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08430, 14.41750 |
| Part of Walk | Kafka's Prague: A Literary Walk Through the Writers' City |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into the small, quiet square and face the white building with two steep, pointed gables side by side. It looks medieval, and it is... and it is also younger than many of the people walking past it. Both are true, and that is the story.
Bethlehem Chapel was founded in 1391 for one unusual purpose: preaching in Czech. Not in Latin, the language of the Church and the university, but in the language of market women, brewers and craftsmen. The hall could hold around three thousand people. From 1402 its preacher was a university master named Jan Hus, and Prague came to listen.
Hus did not only speak Czech, he thought hard about how to write it. A Latin treatise on Czech spelling, traditionally attributed to him, proposed replacing clumsy letter combinations with single letters marked by small signs above them. From that idea grew the háček and the čárka, the little hooks and accents on every street sign in this city. Every time you struggle to pronounce Dvořák, you can blame, or thank, this building. Centuries later, other Slavic languages, Slovak, Slovenian and Croatian among them, borrowed the same idea.
Hus attacked the sale of indulgences and the wealth of the clergy, and in 1415 the Council of Constance had him burned at the stake as a heretic. His followers, the Hussites, held Bohemia against crusade after crusade, and the chapel became a sacred place of the Czech Reformation... until the Jesuits took it over, and in the late eighteenth century most of it was pulled down.
What you see is a reconstruction from the early 1950s, raised on the old foundations around surviving fragments of the original walls. The communist government admired Hus as a revolutionary hero. A medieval reformer, restored by an atheist state to celebrate a rebellion... Prague again. Now continue west through the lanes to Anenské náměstí, a tiny square with a theatre whose name means On the Balustrade.