Letná & Holešovice: Prague's Hidden North Bank, from Stalin's Ghost to the Royal Game Park

Above the river bend and beyond it: a sculptor's mystic villa, the plinth of a demolished Stalin, the plain where 750,000 people ended communism, a prize-winning world's fair pavilion, the saints of Charles Bridge and a king's hunting ground

Prague · 11 stops · 25 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Bílek Villa: A Sculptor's House Built Like a Wheat Field

   Mickiewiczova 233/1, 160 00 Praha 6, Czechia

   Stop in front of the dark red brick house on the corner and take a moment, because it does not behave like a house. Its front is a row of rough, tapering pillars, and the whole building bends gently, as if it had grown out of the ground rather than been built on it.

   This is the villa of František Bílek, sculptor, engraver and mystic, who designed it himself as his home and studio and moved in just before the First World War. Bílek is said to have imagined it as a field of ripe wheat: the pillars are the sheaves, the curved plan is the sweep of a harvester's blade. For him a house was not a box for furniture. It was a statement about work, bread and the human soul.

   Bílek was one of the strangest and most original Czech artists of his time. He carved huge, elongated figures that seem to be stretching upwards towards the light, wrestling with pain and faith. His great wooden crucifix hangs in St Vitus Cathedral up on the castle hill, and visitors who expect a quiet Baroque Christ are startled by its raw, gaunt suffering. His closest friend was the symbolist poet Otokar Březina, and the two of them wrote and thought about art almost as a religious calling.

   Inside, the rooms flow into one another around a tall studio that Bílek treated almost as a temple. The furniture is carved by his own hand, chairs and cupboards covered in symbols, so that even sitting down becomes part of the sermon. Today the villa belongs to the Prague City Gallery and keeps much of his work where he made it.

   It is also the perfect doorway to this walk. Most visitors to Prague stay below, among the crowds of the Old Town and the castle. Up here, on the edge of the Letná plateau, the city is quieter, greener and full of things almost nobody comes to see. Cross the road and walk east along Gogolova, towards the river, to a grand villa behind a long garden fence.

2. 2. Kramář Villa: The Prime Minister Who Was Sentenced to Death

   Gogolova 212/1, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   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.

3. 3. Hanavský Pavilion: Cast-Iron Lace and the Ladder of Bridges

   Letenské sady 173, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

   Lean on the stone balustrade in front of the little cast-iron pavilion and look down. The river curls below you, and its bridges line up one behind another like the rungs of a ladder laid across the water. Most visitors to Prague never climb up here. That is their loss, and today your gain.

   The pavilion behind you is a small wonder of the industrial age. It was cast for the Jubilee Exhibition of 1891 by the ironworks at Komárov, in central Bohemia, which belonged to the Princes of Hanau, hence the name. It was a showpiece of what Bohemian foundries could do: columns, balconies and lace-like Neo-Baroque ornament, all of it iron pretending to be stone and stucco. After the exhibition it was taken apart like a construction kit and rebuilt here on the edge of Letná in 1898.

   Now count the bridges, if you can. The nearest is the Čech Bridge, with its bronze figures on tall columns, then the Mánes Bridge, then Charles Bridge with its line of dark statues, then on into the haze towards the National Theatre. This angle, from above and from the side, is the classic postcard view of Prague's bridges, and it costs nothing but a climb.

   The park around you, Letenské sady, was laid out in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the growing city needed somewhere green for its Sunday walks, on a plateau that had been fields, vineyards and military ground. The exhibition of 1891 that gave birth to this pavilion will come back again at the end of the walk, because its grounds lie just behind the hill, in Holešovice.

   Turn east now and follow the broad promenade along the edge of the park. Ahead of you, high above the Čech Bridge, a giant needle swings slowly from side to side against the sky. Walk towards it, and get ready for the strangest pedestal in Prague.

4. 4. The Metronome: Where Stalin Stood for Seven Years

   Letenské sady, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

   Stand at the foot of the giant metronome and watch its arm swing slowly, ticking off time above the city. Then look at what it stands on: a colossal platform of stone, with stairways and terraces, far too big for a metronome. That is because it was built for someone else... Stalin.

   On 1 May 1955, the largest group statue in Europe was unveiled here. Joseph Stalin in granite, about fifteen metres high, led a line of Czech and Soviet figures, workers, soldiers and scientists, towards a shining future. From the Old Town it dominated the skyline. Praguers, who have a gift for this kind of thing, soon gave it a nickname: the queue for meat, because that is exactly what it looked like, a line of people standing patiently behind the man at the front.

   The story of its sculptor is darker. Otakar Švec won the competition and then had to live with it. Weeks before the unveiling he took his own life, and never saw the work finished. By then Stalin himself had been dead for two years. In 1956 Khrushchev denounced him, and the monument became an embarrassment nobody knew how to remove. In 1962 it was finally blown up, behind fences, in a series of explosions, with the city told as little as possible.

   For decades the plinth stood empty. Then came its strange afterlife. After the Velvet Revolution a pirate station calling itself Radio Stalin broadcast from the cellars beneath it. In 1991 the artist Vratislav Novák set up this metronome, a reminder that time passes, even for dictators. And in 1996 a giant statue of Michael Jackson briefly stood on the pedestal to promote his concert in Prague.

   Today the plateau belongs to skateboarders, students with a bottle of wine and couples watching the sunset over the bridges. It may be the most cheerful spot in Prague built on the foundations of the grimmest. Now walk north, away from the river, through the trees to the edge of a huge open field.

5. 5. Letná Plain: The Field Where a Regime Heard the Keys

   Letenská pláň, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

   Walk out onto the wide, flat grassland and keep going until the traffic noise fades behind you. It is just a field, enormous and a little scruffy, with a football stadium on one side and tram lines along the edges. And yet more Czech history has gathered on this grass than in many palaces.

   For decades the communist regime used Letná as its parade ground. On May Day and on great anniversaries, columns of soldiers, tanks and missiles rolled past a tribune where the party leaders stood and waved, and factory delegations marched past with banners and portraits. Attendance was not exactly optional.

   Then, on 25 and 26 November 1989, a week after police had beaten students on Národní street, the opposition Civic Forum called a rally here. Around three quarters of a million people came, the largest demonstration in the country's history. They jingled their keys in the cold air, a sound like hundreds of thousands of tiny bells, telling the regime that its time was up. A general strike followed, and barely a month later the dissident playwright Václav Havel was president.

   The same field has seen almost everything since. In April 1990 Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass here, the first papal visit to Czechoslovakia, before a vast crowd. Rock concerts, circuses and festivals have pitched their tents here, and every few years the field fills again when Czechs feel the need to say something together.

   On the western side stands the stadium of Sparta Prague, one of the oldest football clubs in the country, founded in 1893. On match days the whole neighbourhood turns red, and the rivalry with Slavia, from across the river, is older than Czechoslovakia itself. Now head for the eastern edge of the plain, where a long pale building of the 1930s stands on Kostelní street.

6. 6. National Technical Museum: Flying Machines Under Glass

   Kostelní 1320/42, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

   In front of you stands a long, sober building of pale stone, rows of identical windows and no ornament at all: functionalism, the architecture of the 1930s. Do not judge it by its face. Behind it is one of the most spectacular rooms in Prague.

   The great Transport Hall of the National Technical Museum is a glass-roofed space full of steam locomotives, early motorcycles and vintage cars, and above them, hanging in mid-air, aeroplanes, as if they had just taken off. Among the cars are early Laurin and Klement automobiles, the ancestors of Škoda, and streamlined Tatras of the 1930s that looked like spaceships when other cars still looked like carriages.

   The museum was founded in 1908, and this building was designed for it in the 1930s, completed just as the Second World War was sweeping everything aside. After decades of service it closed for a long reconstruction and reopened in 2011, and the old giants came back out of storage, polished and gleaming.

   This is a good place to remember how inventive this small country has been. In 1754 a village priest in Moravia, Prokop Diviš, built a lightning conductor, at almost the same time as Benjamin Franklin was experimenting in America. And in 1961 the chemist Otto Wichterle, working at home over Christmas, produced the first soft contact lenses on an apparatus he built from a children's construction set and a bicycle dynamo. Millions of people looking at the world through soft lenses owe something to that kitchen table in Prague.

   Czechs tell those stories with a mixture of pride and irony, as if to say: imagine what we could have done with more luck and fewer occupations. Now walk east along the edge of the park, past the old Letná chateau and its terrace, to a strange building of glass and white steel that once won a world's fair.

7. 7. Expo 58 Pavilion: The Glass Box That Beat the World

   Letenské sady 1500, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

   Through the trees you will see an unusual building of glass and slender white steel, like a box of light balanced on the edge of the hill. It looks almost too modern for its age. It was designed for a world's fair in Brussels in 1958... and it brought home the top prize.

   Expo 58 was the first great world's fair after the Second World War, the one that gave Brussels the Atomium. Czechoslovakia arrived with a pavilion nobody expected from a communist country: light, witty and human, full of glass, puppets, film and design instead of tractors and propaganda. The jury awarded it the gold star for the best pavilion of the whole exhibition.

   Inside, visitors queued for something completely new: Laterna Magika, a show that mixed film projected on moving screens with live actors and dancers, so that people stepped in and out of the picture. It was a sensation, and it later became a permanent Prague theatre, still running decades later. Czech glass, Czech animated film and Czech design were, for a moment, the talk of the world.

   After the fair, the restaurant wing of the pavilion was dismantled, brought back and rebuilt here on Letná, overlooking the river. It became a fashionable restaurant in the optimistic years of the late fifties and the sixties. Then came 1968, the invasion, and the long grey decades of normalisation, when optimism went out of fashion, and the building slowly decayed with them. After 1989 it was restored and given a new life as offices.

   It is a good symbol of that brief window, when Czechoslovakia showed the world how imaginative it could be. Now leave the park and walk down into Holešovice, along Dukelských hrdinů street, to an enormous white building with endless rows of windows, a palace built for trade fairs.

8. 8. Trade Fair Palace: Functionalist Giant, Hall of Departure

   Dukelských hrdinů 530/47, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

   Step back far enough to take in the white building in front of you: long bands of windows, flat roof, not a single column or statue. It is the size of an ocean liner, and when it was finished in 1928 it was one of the largest functionalist buildings in the world.

   Veletržní palác, the Trade Fair Palace, was designed by Oldřich Tyl and Josef Fuchs for Prague's sample fairs, where manufacturers showed off everything from machines to porcelain. Inside, a vast hall rises through several floors, wrapped in white galleries. Le Corbusier, the great prophet of modern architecture, came to see it in 1928, and he is said to have been both impressed and slightly provoked: the Czechs had built on a scale he had so far only drawn.

   Then came the darkest chapter. During the German occupation, from October 1941, the Jews of Prague received summonses to a wooden exhibition hall on these trade fair grounds, beside the palace. They came with the luggage they were allowed, were registered, and waited there, often for days, before being marched to the nearby Bubny railway station and deported, first to the ghetto of Łódź, then to Terezín and on to the camps in the East. Tens of thousands passed through. Most never came back. At Bubny station, a few hundred metres east of here, a memorial now keeps their memory.

   In 1974 a great fire gutted the palace, and for years it seemed lost. It was restored, and since the 1990s it has been the National Gallery's home for modern and contemporary art, from Czech Cubists to Picasso, Klimt and Schiele. For several years after 2012, Alfons Mucha's twenty huge canvases of The Slav Epic hung in its great hall.

   So the building that once processed departures now holds some of the finest art in the country. Prague rarely lets a place have only one story. Now walk north along Dukelských hrdinů to the gates of the old exhibition grounds, Výstaviště.

9. 9. Lapidárium: The Original Saints of Charles Bridge

   Výstaviště 422, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

   Walk up to the long, low exhibition pavilion at the edge of the fairground. From outside it looks like a storage hall. Inside, it is a crowd of stone giants: saints, kings, angels and fountains, standing shoulder to shoulder as if waiting for a train.

   This is the Lapidárium of the National Museum, the collection of original stone sculpture from Bohemia, from the Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Many of the statues you admire around Prague today are copies. The soft sandstone of the originals was being eaten away by weather and city air, so one by one they were taken down, replaced by replicas, and brought in here to rest.

   The most famous refugees came from Charles Bridge. In September 1890 a terrible flood smashed into the bridge, broke two of its arches and swept two Baroque statues into the river, the Jesuit saints Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier. They were fished out of the Vltava in pieces, and what survived ended up here. Standing face to face with Brokoff's sculptures, close enough to see the chisel marks, is something you can never do on the crowded bridge.

   Here too lie fragments of the Marian Column that once stood on Old Town Square. On 3 November 1918, days after independence, a crowd pulled it down as a symbol of Habsburg rule, and for a century there was only an empty spot in the paving. In 2020 a replica was raised again, after years of passionate argument. Nearby stands the Renaissance Krocín Fountain, which once supplied water to Old Town Square until it was removed in the nineteenth century.

   It is one of the quietest museums in Prague, and one of the most moving: history without the crowds. From here, walk a few steps into the exhibition grounds, towards the iron and glass palace with the tall tower.

10. 10. Industrial Palace & Křižík Fountain: The Exhibition That Lit Up Prague

    Výstaviště 67, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

    Stand in front of the great palace of iron and glass, its tall central tower rising over the exhibition grounds, its wings stretching out like arms. In 1891 this was the stage on which a small nation, still without a state of its own, showed the world what it could do.

    The Jubilee Exhibition of 1891 marked a hundred years since an industrial exhibition held in Prague in 1791. Most German-speaking industrialists of Bohemia boycotted it, so it turned into a great Czech show of confidence. Millions of visitors came. The same summer gave Prague the Petřín lookout tower, the Petřín funicular, and the cast-iron pavilion you saw at the start of this walk.

    The star of the exhibition was an engineer called František Křižík, sometimes called the Czech Edison. His improved arc lamp had already won a gold medal at the electrical exhibition in Paris in 1881. For 1891 he built Prague's first electric tram, which ran from Letná to these grounds, and behind the palace, a fountain that danced with coloured electric light, an unheard-of marvel for people who still read by gaslight.

    The palace has had its troubles. In October 2008 a fire destroyed its left wing, and the twisted iron frame stood as a wreck for years. Its rebuilding has been a long, slow affair, and the palace remains one of the great repair projects of the city.

    Walk round behind it to see Křižík's fountain, restored for its centenary in 1991, when it was given a new life of evening shows of water, colour and music. On summer nights thousands of jets rise and fall to the music, and for a moment the grounds feel like 1891 again. From the fountain, take the path west, out of the exhibition grounds, under the old trees of Stromovka.

11. 11. Stromovka: The King's Hunting Ground and the Emperor's Tunnel

    Královská obora, 170 00 Praha 7, Czechia

    Walk in under the old trees and let the avenue lead you towards the water. Meadows, ponds, oaks and plane trees, joggers and pushchairs: Stromovka looks like any great city park. But it began as a royal hunting ground more than seven and a half centuries ago.

    Tradition says that King Přemysl Otakar II founded a game reserve here in 1268, with deer and boar for royal hunts and walls to keep everyone else out. The nickname Stromovka simply means the place of trees, but its official name is still Královská obora, the Royal Game Reserve. For centuries ordinary Praguers could only peer through the gates.

    Its golden age came with Emperor Rudolf II, the eccentric Habsburg who made Prague a capital of alchemists and astronomers around 1600. He wanted ponds, and his engineers delivered something extraordinary: a tunnel more than a kilometre long, cut through the rock beneath Letná, to bring water from the Vltava into the park. It was dug by hand between 1584 and 1593, and it still runs, hidden, beneath the plateau you crossed earlier on this walk.

    In 1804 the reserve was finally opened to the public, and the people of Prague claimed it as their own. The river has not always been kind to it. In August 2002 the great flood poured over Holešovice, and the whole park lay under water, the ponds and the river becoming one silver sheet. It recovered, as it always has. At its western end, look out for a small castle-like summer palace with battlements, once used by the governors of Bohemia, standing on its rise like a toy fortress above the meadows.

    So here the walk ends, far from the crowds: a sculptor's mystic house, a condemned man's villa, Stalin's empty plinth, the field of the keys, a pavilion that beat the world, and a king's forest. Find a bench by the water, listen to the trees, and remember that Prague's best secrets are usually just over the hill.