Náprstek House: The Brewery Widow and the Thimble

Why is it significant?

Here on Betlémské náměstí, face the long building on the corner with its quiet courtyard behind the gate. It is a museum today, full of masks and objects from Asia, Africa and the Americas. But the house once smelled of mash and malt, and it was run by one of the toughest businesswomen in Prague.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Here on Betlémské náměstí, face the long building on the corner with its quiet courtyard behind the gate. It is a museum today, full of masks and objects from Asia, Africa and the Americas. But the house once smelled of mash and malt, and it was run by one of the toughest businesswomen in Prague.

The house is called U Halánků, and in the early nineteenth century it held a brewery and a spirits distillery. It belonged to the Fingerhut family. When Anna Fingerhutová was widowed, she did not sell up as everyone expected. She ran the brewery and distillery herself, expanded the business and grew wealthy, at a time when a woman running a brewery was almost unheard of.

Her son Vojtěch took a different path. In the revolution of 1848 he joined the Czech patriots, and afterwards he spent about ten years in exile in America, working, among other things, in Milwaukee... a city that would itself become famous for beer. He came home in 1858, full of American ideas about practical education, self-help and modern housekeeping. Back in Prague, he made a very Czech gesture: he translated his German surname. Fingerhut means thimble, and the Czech for thimble is náprstek. And so Vojta Náprstek was born.

With the family fortune made in beer and spirits, he founded a museum of industry in 1862 to show Czechs the latest machines and household inventions, and he opened his house to lectures, a library and an early club for women's education. The collections he gathered from travellers became today's Náprstek Museum, part of the National Museum.

So every glass sold over the counter of U Halánků helped pay for ideas: kitchen technology, women's lectures, ethnographic collections. Not bad for a brewery. Now walk south from the square along the gently curving street of Na Perštýně, to a tavern with bears on its sign.