Old Royal Palace & The Defenestration Chamber: Where Revolutions Began

Why is it significant?

Walk across the weathered stone threshold into the immense expanse of Vladislav Hall inside the Old Royal Palace. Look up at the complex web of Late Gothic blooming ribbed vaulting, curving across sixty meters of open space without a single supporting central pillar.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Walk across the weathered stone threshold into the immense expanse of Vladislav Hall inside the Old Royal Palace. Look up at the complex web of Late Gothic blooming ribbed vaulting, curving across sixty meters of open space without a single supporting central pillar. The hall was so vast that medieval Bohemian knights rode their horses directly up the Riders' Staircase to hold indoor jousting tournaments.

Turn down the narrow wood-paneled corridor leading into the Bohemian Chancellery. On the twenty-third of May, sixteen eighteen, an assembly of furious Protestant nobles marched into this very room, seized two Catholic royal governors and their scribe, and hurled them bodily out of the high mullioned window.

Miraculously, all three men survived the seventy-foot fall into the castle moat below, landing in a soft heap of manure and fallen leaves. Catholic chroniclers proclaimed the survival a divine angelic miracle, while Protestants cursed the pungent refuse pile. This dramatic act of defiance ignited the cataclysmic Thirty Years' War across the entire European continent.

Look through the open window frame down into the garden moat, imagining the sheer shock of that historic morning four centuries ago.