Prague's Green Hill: Petřín Orchards, the Hunger Wall & Strahov's Painted Libraries

From a memorial of vanishing bronze men up through cherry orchards, a little Eiffel Tower and Charles IV's battlemented wall, to monks' libraries, Loreta's bells and the emperor's deer ravine

Prague · 11 stops · 27 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Memorial to the Victims of Communism

   Újezd, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Stand at the foot of the hill, where the tram stop meets the green slope, and look at the stairway climbing towards the trees. Seven bronze men are walking down it towards you, one behind the other. The man at the bottom looks whole. The ones behind him are missing an arm, a leg, half a chest... and the highest is barely a silhouette at all.

   This is the Memorial to the Victims of Communism, unveiled in 2002, twelve years after the regime fell. The sculptor was Olbram Zoubek, working with the architects Jan Kerel and Zdeněk Hölzel. Zoubek knew the subject from close up. In January 1969, when the student Jan Palach burned himself to death in protest against the Soviet occupation, it was Zoubek who took his death mask, and for the next twenty years he was largely shut out of official art.

   Now walk up to the bronze strip that runs along the middle of the steps. It is a ledger. Its numbers count the cost of the communist years: more than two hundred thousand people sentenced, 248 executed, some four and a half thousand who died in prison, 327 killed trying to cross the border, and more than 170,000 who left the country. There are no names. That is the point. The figures stand for people whose lives were not always ended, but slowly taken apart, exactly like the bronze.

   Come back at dusk, when the lights along the steps come on and the men seem to step out of the dark. Locals hurry past to the tram, children run up the steps on Sunday afternoons... and that ordinariness is part of the design. The memorial does not sit in a solemn, fenced-off square. It stands at a busy corner of Malá Strana, at the exact line where the city stops and the hill begins.

   And that is where this walk is going: up. Petřín is Prague's green hill, a slope of orchards, woods and old stone that rises straight out of the historic centre, and almost every Praguer has a memory of it, a first kiss, a school trip, a winter sledge run. Walk a few steps north along Újezd to the bottom of the funicular, then either ride it one stop or take the footpath beside the track. We meet again at the halfway station, among the trees.

2. 2. Petřín Funicular at Nebozízek

   Petřínské sady, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Catch your breath on the little platform halfway up the hill and wait for the rumble. A carriage slides down out of the trees above you, another one is climbing up from below, and somewhere between them they pass each other on a short stretch of double track, as politely as two neighbours on a narrow staircase.

   The Petřín funicular opened in 1891, for the great Jubilee Exhibition that showed off the industry of the Czech lands. And in those first years it ran on water. Each car carried a tank. At the top, the car about to go down was filled with water until it was heavier than the car waiting at the bottom. Gravity did the rest, the heavy car pulled the light one up on a steel rope, and at the bottom the water was simply let out. No engine, no electricity... just weight and patience.

   The hill itself has never been so cooperative. Petřín is built of layers of clay and marl stone, and its slopes like to slide. The line stopped during the First World War, came back in 1932 with electric drive, and then in 1965 a landslide damaged the slope so badly that the funicular was closed for twenty years. It only reopened in 1985. So the carriages you hear are riding on ground that Prague's engineers still watch very carefully.

   Now turn around and take in the view from Nebozízek. Below you lie the red roofs of Malá Strana, the green dome and tower of St Nicholas, the river, and beyond it the spires of the Old Town, layer after layer. Nobody is quite sure where the name Nebozízek comes from. In Czech a nebozez is a small hand drill, and one theory says the path up here twisted like one... but it is only a theory, and a pleasant one.

   Look at the trees around the station, too. Many of them are fruit trees, and they are not here by accident. Leave the tracks now and follow the path north across the slope, into the orchards. In spring this whole hillside turns white and pink... and the next stop explains why Praguers come here on the first of May.

3. 3. Seminary Garden Orchards

   Seminářská zahrada, Petřínské sady, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk in among the fruit trees and listen for a moment. On a quiet morning you hear more blackbirds than traffic, even though Charles Bridge is less than a kilometre away. These are old orchards of apple, pear and cherry, planted in rows down the slope, and in late April the blossom is so thick that the hillside seems to float above the city.

   The name, Seminářská zahrada, comes from the archbishop's seminary, the college for young priests, which once owned this land. But fruit and vines on Petřín are far older than that. In the Middle Ages these slopes were covered with vineyards, and the hill was also a quarry. The chronicler Cosmas, writing around 1100, explained the name Petřín with the Latin word for rock, petra. That rock, a pale grey-yellow marl stone called opuka, went into Prague's Romanesque churches and many of its early town houses.

   On the first of May, this is where Prague comes to kiss. Tradition says a couple should kiss under a blossoming tree on May Day, and the classic place to do it is Petřín, near the statue of the Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha. His long poem Máj, May, published in 1836, opens on a late evening in May, the time of love, and almost every Czech can recite that first line. Mácha died that same year, aged just twenty-five... so the couples are, in a way, keeping his poem alive for him.

   Now find a bench and look north-east. Prague Castle and the spires of St Vitus sit on the ridge to your left, the river shines below, and the towers of the Old Town crowd together on the far bank. It is one of the finest views in the city, and you often have it almost to yourself, because most visitors are still queuing for the funicular.

   There is something lovely about a capital that keeps working orchards in its centre. In late summer the fruit simply ripens and drops into the long grass, as it has for generations. Now climb the paths up the slope, heading south-west towards the top of the hill. Look for two white domes rising out of the trees... that is where Prague goes to look at the stars.

4. 4. Štefánik Observatory & the Rose Garden

   Strahovská 205, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   You have reached the flat top of the hill. On one side of the path, rose beds laid out in neat geometric patterns, heavy with scent in June. On the other side, two white domes with narrow slits, waiting for the night. It is hard to think of two neighbours with more different ideas of beauty.

   The Štefánik Observatory opened in 1928, ten years after Czechoslovakia was born, and it carries the name of a remarkable man. Milan Rastislav Štefánik was a Slovak astronomer who worked at the observatory on top of Mont Blanc and travelled as far as Tahiti for his science. In the First World War he became a general in the French army and, with Masaryk and Beneš, one of the three founders of Czechoslovakia. In May 1919, flying home, his plane crashed near Bratislava. He was thirty-eight.

   This was never meant to be a scientist's ivory tower. It was built by the Czech Astronomical Society, founded in 1917 by enthusiasts who wanted ordinary people to be able to look through a proper telescope. And that is still what happens here. On a clear evening you may find yourself in a queue of schoolchildren, pensioners and a couple on a date, all waiting their turn at the eyepiece to see the craters of the Moon or the rings of Saturn, right in the middle of a capital city.

   The rose garden came a few years later, in the 1930s, and it is a much more earthbound pleasure. Walk between the beds and notice how the hill flattens out up here: this is the summit plateau, more than three hundred metres above sea level and well over a hundred metres above the river. And behind the roses runs an old battlemented stone wall. You will meet it properly later. It is six centuries older than the roses and the telescopes put together.

   Now follow the broad path north along the ridge, past the upper station of the funicular. Ahead of you, through the trees, a steel tower is already showing its top... and anyone who has ever been to Paris will feel a strange sense of déjà vu.

5. 5. Petřín Lookout Tower & the Mirror Maze

   Petřínské sady 633, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Tilt your head back. Above you rises an octagonal lattice of steel, sixty-three and a half metres high, narrowing towards a lantern at the top. Yes, it looks like a little sister of the Eiffel Tower. That is exactly what it was meant to be.

   In 1889 members of the Club of Czech Tourists went to the World Exhibition in Paris, climbed Eiffel's brand-new tower, and came home determined to have one of their own. They had it standing in time for the Jubilee Exhibition of 1891, after only a few months of construction. It is roughly a fifth of the Eiffel Tower's height, but it has a trick: it stands on top of a hill. Praguers love to tell you that its lantern sits at about the same height above sea level as the very top of the tower in Paris.

   Inside, 299 steps spiral up to the galleries. For decades the tower also worked for a living, carrying television transmitters until the new Žižkov Tower took over in the 1990s. And there is a story, impossible to prove but impossible for Praguers to resist, that Hitler, looking out from the castle in March 1939, wanted the tower torn down because it spoiled his view. It survived him by a very long way.

   Two neighbours belong to the same story. The little castle-like pavilion nearby is the Mirror Maze, also built for the 1891 exhibition and moved up here soon afterwards; its facade copies a Gothic gate of Vyšehrad. After the distorting mirrors comes a huge diorama of Prague students and burghers defending Charles Bridge against the Swedes in 1648, in the last weeks of the Thirty Years' War. And the Baroque church of St Lawrence beside it stands, legend says, where pagans once kept a sacred fire, until Prince Boleslaus the Second and Bishop Adalbert built a chapel on the spot at the end of the tenth century.

   Now walk round to the old stone wall right behind the tower, the one with the square battlements, and follow it north towards Strahov. It is older than anything else on this hill... and it comes with a story Prague has been telling for more than six hundred years.

6. 6. The Hunger Wall

   Hladová zeď, Petřínské sady, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk alongside the wall for a while and run your hand over the stone: rough blocks of Petřín marl, crowned with square battlements like a row of teeth. It comes from Strahov just ahead of you, runs back along the ridge past the lookout tower, then drops all the way down the slope to Újezd, where this walk began.

   This is the Hunger Wall, Hladová zeď, built in the early 1360s on the orders of Emperor Charles IV. It was a serious piece of military engineering. It closed off the Lesser Town and the castle district on their western side, the side where an enemy could come over the hill, and it is more than a kilometre long. Charles was building Prague into one of the great capitals of Europe, and this wall was part of the armour.

   And the name? The famous story says that a famine struck Prague, and the emperor, instead of handing out alms, gave the hungry poor paid work building this wall... bread for stones. It is a lovely tale of a wise king, and Praguers still tell it. But there is no solid contemporary evidence for it, and many historians treat it as a legend that grew up later around a name nobody could quite explain.

   The wall's military career was short. Within a couple of centuries gunpowder had made walls like this old-fashioned, and it became more a boundary than a defence. It still is one. On your side, the wooded slope of Petřín. On the far side, out of sight, lies the vast Strahov Stadium, built between the wars for the mass gymnastic displays of the Sokol movement, when thousands of people moved in perfect unison on the grass.

   Notice how much life clings to the old stone: moss on the north face, ivy, wildflowers in the joints, and birds perching on the battlements. Six hundred years of weather have turned a fortification into a habitat. Keep the wall on your left and follow it until it meets the gardens of a monastery. Two white towers will appear ahead... the monks behind them have been collecting books for almost nine hundred years.

7. 7. Strahov Monastery & its Library Halls

   Strahovské nádvoří 1/132, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Step into the courtyard of Strahov Monastery and face the twin white towers of the basilica. So close to the castle, it feels more like a village square than a monument: cobbles, old trees, a small church to one side, and now and then a canon in a white habit crossing the yard.

   Strahov was founded in 1143 by Prince Vladislav the Second and Bishop Jindřich Zdík for the Premonstratensians, an order of canons who dress in white. It stood on the road into Prague from the west, a spiritual gateway to the city. Fires and wars damaged it again and again, and each time it was rebuilt, which is why a medieval monastery now wears a Baroque face. The story goes that in 1787 Mozart sat down at the organ of the basilica and improvised for the monks.

   Its treasure is the library. The Theological Hall, from the 1670s, is a long, low vault covered in stucco and painted frames, lined with old leather bindings, with antique globes standing down the middle. The Philosophical Hall next door is a different world: walnut bookcases two storeys high, and a ceiling fresco painted in 1794 by Franz Anton Maulbertsch, a sky crowded with the thinkers of history, from Moses to Socrates. Maulbertsch was about seventy, and, they say, finished the whole ceiling in around six months.

   Those walnut bookcases have their own secret. In the 1780s Emperor Joseph the Second dissolved hundreds of monasteries he considered useless. Strahov survived partly by presenting itself as a place of learning... and when the Moravian monastery of Louka was abolished, Strahov acquired its bookcases and built the Philosophical Hall to fit them. One monastery's death furnished another's masterpiece.

   Strahov's luck ran out in 1950, when the communist regime closed it, expelled the canons and turned the buildings into a museum of literature. The order came back after 1989, and the books are still here, around two hundred thousand volumes. Now walk out through the gate towards Pohořelec and bear right into the long square in front of an enormous palace... where one of the darkest mysteries of 1948 took place.

8. 8. Černín Palace

   Loretánské náměstí 5, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk slowly along the front of Černín Palace and count the columns. There are thirty of them, giant half-columns marching along a facade roughly a hundred and fifty metres long, the longest of any Baroque palace in Prague. This is not a house. It is a statement in stone.

   It was begun in the late 1660s for Count Humprecht Jan Czernin, who had served as the emperor's ambassador in Venice and came home with Venetian ideas of grandeur. The ambition outlived the money. Over the following centuries the palace was plundered in wartime, decayed, and in the nineteenth century was sold to the state and used as army barracks. After 1918 it was restored for the Foreign Ministry of the new Czechoslovakia, and the ministry is still here today.

   During the German occupation it housed the office of the Reich Protector. And on the morning of the tenth of March 1948, two weeks after the communist coup, it became the scene of the most famous death in modern Czech history. Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk, son of the country's founding president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, was found dead in the palace courtyard, beneath the window of his bathroom. He was the most prominent non-communist left in the new government.

   Suicide, accident or murder? The regime announced suicide. Praguers quietly called it the third Prague defenestration. Investigations after 1989 came to different conclusions: one, in 2004, pointed to murder, while a later review left the question open. The courtyard is not open to visitors, but the question still hangs over this square, more than seventy-five years later.

   History turned one more page here. In 1991, in Prague, the Warsaw Pact that had sent its tanks into Czechoslovakia in 1968 was formally dissolved. Now turn around and look across the square at the small, sparkling Baroque facade facing the palace, a Marian shrine whose bells have rung over this square since the end of the seventeenth century. Cross over to it.

9. 9. Loreta and its Carillon

   Loretánské náměstí 7, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Stand in front of the Loreta and wait for the hour. High in the tower above the entrance, a set of bells begins to play a slow Marian hymn, clear and a little melancholy, and the sound drifts across the square to the stern columns of the palace opposite.

   Loreta was founded in 1626 by a noblewoman, Kateřina of Lobkowicz, in the middle of the Thirty Years' War, when the Habsburgs were bringing Bohemia back to Catholicism after the Protestant defeat at White Mountain in 1620. At its heart stands a copy of the Santa Casa, the Holy House of the Virgin Mary, which, according to legend, angels carried from Nazareth to the Italian town of Loreto. Copies of it sprang up all over Central Europe, and this became the most famous of them.

   The bells were a gift from a Prague merchant, Eberhard Glauch, cast in Amsterdam by the bell founder Claudius Fremy. There are twenty-seven of them, and they have been playing over Hradčany since the 1690s. Behind the facade, rebuilt by the Dientzenhofers in the 1720s, the treasury keeps the most dazzling object in Prague: a monstrance made in Vienna in 1699 and known as the Prague Sun, set with 6,222 diamonds.

   And look for the strangest saint in the building. In one of the corner chapels of the cloister hangs a crucified woman... with a beard. She is Saint Starosta, also called Wilgefortis, a legendary princess who prayed to be made ugly so that she would not have to marry a pagan king. Her prayer was answered with a beard, and her furious father had her crucified. The Church quietly dropped her from the calendar long ago, but here she still hangs.

   The Loreta has played its hymn through wars, occupations and revolutions, and it is one of the sounds that defines this quiet end of Prague. Now leave the square at its northern end, past the plain walls of the Capuchin monastery, and walk down Černínská street. In a minute you will step into a lane that time seems to have forgotten.

10. 10. Nový Svět Lane

    Nový Svět, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

    Walk slowly down Nový Svět, the New World, a crooked lane of low, brightly painted houses with tiled roofs and little windows. No shops, no crowds, a cobbled gutter, a lamp on a bracket... It is hard to believe that the castle, with its endless stream of visitors, is only a few hundred metres away.

    This was a poor quarter, settled in the fourteenth century just outside the walls, where castle servants, craftsmen and labourers lived. After the great fire of 1541 swept through Hradčany and the Lesser Town, the cottages were rebuilt, and many still carry their old house signs. Look for the Golden Pear and its golden cousins: some of the humblest houses in Prague were given some of its grandest names.

    Around 1600 the lane is said to have had a famous resident. Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who came to Prague to serve Emperor Rudolf the Second, lived up here for a while, according to tradition. The story goes that he could not bear the bells of the Capuchin monastery next door, which disturbed his observations and his sleep, and that the emperor, who adored his astronomers, had them silenced.

    What happened in Rudolf's Prague over the next few years changed how we see the sky. Tycho had collected the most precise planetary observations ever made without a telescope. In 1600 a young German mathematician, Johannes Kepler, joined him. Tycho died suddenly in 1601, and Kepler, working in Prague with Tycho's data, showed that the planets move not in circles but in ellipses. In a sense, the solar system got its true shape a short walk from this lane.

    Tycho's death itself became a legend: that politeness kept him at a banquet table too long and his bladder burst. In 2010 scientists opened his tomb in the Týn Church and found no evidence that he had been poisoned with mercury, as some had suspected. Now walk to the end of the lane and head east, towards the Powder Bridge, the road that leads to the castle's northern gate. Our last stop lies below that road, in a green ravine where an emperor kept his animals.

11. 11. The Stag Moat & the Powder Bridge

    U Prašného mostu, 118 00 Praha 1, Czechia

    Stand by the Powder Bridge and look down into the ravine. Below you lies a deep green gorge, full of trees, with a small stream running along its floor. On one side rise the northern walls of Prague Castle, on the other the slopes of the Royal Garden... and the noise of the city simply drops away.

    This is the Stag Moat, Jelení příkop. It is not a dug moat at all but a natural ravine cut by the little Brusnice stream, and for centuries it protected the castle's northern flank. In the sixteenth century the Habsburg kings turned it into a game park, and deer were kept down here, which gave the ravine its name. Emperor Rudolf the Second, the great collector who filled Prague with alchemists, painters and astronomers, kept even more exotic animals close by: the Lion Court beside the Powder Bridge still carries the memory of his menagerie.

    And here two of our stories meet. Legend says that Tycho Brahe, the astronomer from Nový Svět, warned the emperor that his fate was bound to that of his favourite lion. In January 1612 the lion died, the story goes, and Rudolf, who had already lost his throne to his brother Matthias, followed it within days. It is only a legend... but it is very much a Prague one.

    Under your feet runs one of the city's quietest modern masterpieces. The Powder Bridge is not really a bridge any more but an earth embankment, and in 2002 the architect Josef Pleskot cut a pedestrian tunnel through it, a long oval tube that lets walkers follow the stream from the upper part of the ravine to the lower. When the moat is open, walking through it, with only your footsteps and the water for company, is a small revelation.

    You began this walk at a memorial to people a regime tried to erase, climbed a hill of orchards and quarries, followed an emperor's wall, sat among monks' books and diplomats' secrets, and ended in a ravine where kings once kept their deer. Petřín and its ridge are where Prague breathes... and also where it remembers. The castle's northern gate is right ahead of you, and the trams beside the Royal Garden are a few minutes' walk away.