Kramář Villa: The Prime Minister Who Was Sentenced to Death
Why is it significant?
Look through the railings at the pale, palatial villa sitting in its garden on the very edge of the slope, with the whole of Prague spread out below its terrace. It looks like the summer house of a minor aristocrat. In fact it is where Czech prime ministers live when they want to.
Key Facts
| Place | Kramář Villa: The Prime Minister Who Was Sentenced to Death |
|---|---|
| Address | Gogolova 212/1, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.09340, 14.41050 |
| Part of Walk | Letná & Holešovice: Prague's Hidden North Bank, from Stalin's Ghost to the Royal Game Park |
| Generated | Generated |
Look through the railings at the pale, palatial villa sitting in its garden on the very edge of the slope, with the whole of Prague spread out below its terrace. It looks like the summer house of a minor aristocrat. In fact it is where Czech prime ministers live when they want to.
It was built just before the First World War on the line of the old city ramparts, for Karel Kramář, the leading Czech politician of his day, and his wife Nadezhda, a wealthy Russian from a Moscow merchant family. Kramář was a passionate Russophile. He dreamed of a great union of Slavic nations under the protection of the Tsar, and the villa, with its view over the Czech capital, was meant to be a house worthy of that dream.
Then the dream turned dangerous. When war broke out in 1914, Austria-Hungary was fighting Russia, and Kramář's sympathies were no secret. In 1915 he was arrested, and in 1916 a military court sentenced him to death for high treason. The sentence was commuted, and in 1917 a new emperor, eager for peace at home, granted him an amnesty.
A year later, everything turned upside down. In October 1918 Czechoslovakia declared independence, and the man who had been condemned to the gallows became the first prime minister of the new republic. He led the Czechoslovak delegation to the peace conference in Paris. But his Russia was gone. After the Bolshevik revolution he backed the Whites, and he became a patron of the Russian émigrés who poured into Prague having lost everything.
Kramář died in 1937, before he could see what the next decades would bring. The villa passed through hard times and was restored at the end of the twentieth century, when it became the official residence of the Czech prime minister. Now walk on along the edge of the slope, past the trees, to a lacy pavilion of cast iron with the best view of the bridges in the city.