Vyšehrad: Princess Libuše, Cubist Houses and the Nation's Cemetery in Prague

From the bridge of forged heroes and the raftsmen's tollhouse to Prague's oldest rotunda, a devil's broken column and the graves of Dvořák, Smetana and Mucha on the rock where Prague's founding legend begins

Prague · 10 stops · 23 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. 1. Palacký Bridge: The Bridge of Heroes Who Never Were

   Palackého most, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Listen · 2:23

   Stand at the New Town end of the bridge and look upstream. On the right bank, a dark rock rises straight out of the river with a church's twin spires on top... that is Vyšehrad, the high castle, where this walk is heading. Now look at the bridge itself, solid and a little plain, as if something were missing. Something is.

   The bridge was built in the 1870s and named after František Palacký, the historian the Czechs call the Father of the Nation. His great history of the Czech people gave a small nation inside the Habsburg empire a past to be proud of. And from the late 1880s, the corners of this bridge carried four pairs of colossal sandstone statues by Josef Václav Myslbek, the greatest Czech sculptor of his age: heroes and heroines of the nation's oldest legends.

   Here is the irony. Two of those pairs, the warriors Záboj and Slavoj and the bard Lumír, came from medieval manuscripts that had been sensationally discovered in 1817 and 1818. They were forgeries. Brilliant ones, written to give Czech literature the ancient epic it lacked. Palacký himself defended them as genuine for decades, and the scholars who finally exposed them in the 1880s, among them a young professor called Tomáš Masaryk, were denounced as traitors.

   The statues stood here anyway, until 14 February 1945, when American bombs fell on this part of Prague by mistake. The bridge was hit and the statues were badly damaged. After the war, all four pairs were taken up the hill to Vyšehrad, where they still stand in the park... and you will meet them at the end of this walk.

   So remember the names: Libuše and Přemysl, Ctirad and Šárka, Záboj and Slavoj, Lumír and Song. Real or invented, they are the cast of the story this hill tells. Now cross the embankment road and walk up the slope to the monastery whose roof looks like two white concrete sails.

2. 2. Emmaus Monastery: The Slavonic Abbey with Concrete Sails

   Vyšehradská 49, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Tilt your head back and look at the church roof: instead of Gothic towers, two tall, curved white blades rise from it, crossing like sails or like hands about to clap. Underneath them sits a sober medieval church. The two belong together more than you would think.

   In 1347 the emperor Charles IV founded this monastery for an unusual community: Benedictine monks who celebrated the liturgy not in Latin but in Old Church Slavonic, the language of the missionaries Cyril and Methodius, brought here from Croatia with their own alphabet, the angular Glagolitic script. Charles wanted Prague to be a bridge between the Latin West and the Slavic world, and this monastery was his statement of it. The church was consecrated in the 1370s, on the Monday after Easter, when the Gospel tells of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. Hence the name, Emauzy.

   The monks also copied books. Part of a gospel book written in Glagolitic here in 1395 later made its way to the cathedral of Reims, in France. For generations, French tradition held that kings swore their coronation oath on it, without anyone in the room being able to read a word.

   On 14 February 1945, the same mistaken American raid that struck the bridge hit the monastery. The Gothic towers were wrecked, and for twenty years the church stood with a broken roof. In 1967, the architect František Maria Černý gave it these modern concrete spires, a bold choice in a Communist country that had, in 1950, already expelled the monks.

   After 1989 the Benedictines returned. Inside the cloister, fragments of fourteenth-century wall paintings still survive, faded but alive. Now walk back down to the river and follow the embankment south, upstream, towards the railway bridge. Just before it, look for a small old house with a steep roof that seems to have wandered in from a village.

3. 3. Výtoň Customs House: The Last Village of the Raftsmen

   Rašínovo nábřeží 412, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Find the little house with the tall, steep roof, squeezed between the embankment, the tram tracks and the iron railway bridge. Everything around it is stone, steel and traffic, and it sits there like a grandmother at a rock concert, quietly refusing to leave.

   This is the customs house of Výtoň, and it is the last building of a whole vanished world. For centuries the stretch of riverbank below Vyšehrad was Podskalí, the place under the rock: a village of raftsmen, timber merchants, ice cutters and fishermen, with low houses and yards full of stacked logs. The name Výtoň itself refers to the toll once taken here on the goods that came down the river.

   And what came down the river was wood. Raftsmen tied tree trunks into long floating trains in the forests of southern Bohemia and steered them for days down the Vltava, through rapids and weirs, sleeping on the logs. At Podskalí the rafts were broken up and the timber sold to build and heat Prague. The raftsmen had their own songs, their own slang and a reputation for drinking that the whole city knew.

   Around 1900, Prague decided to tame its riverbank. Stone embankments went up, the railway bridge was built, and the old houses of Podskalí were cleared almost to the last one. This toll house survived, and today it holds a small museum of the vanished village and its rafting trade. Rafting itself only died out in the twentieth century, when the great dams upstream closed the river to the timber trains.

   Look up at the cliff above the tracks: the road vanishes into a tunnel cut straight through the rock of Vyšehrad at the start of the twentieth century. Before you climb the hill, though, you will meet the most avant-garde houses of their time. Walk on along the embankment towards the tunnel, then turn left into the quiet side streets climbing towards Neklanova, and watch the facades start to fold like crystals.

4. 4. Chochol's Cubist Houses: Neklanova 30 and Kovařovic Villa

   Neklanova 30, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Stand back on the opposite pavement and look at the corner of the apartment house at number 30. The facade does not lie flat. It folds, it breaks into prisms and pyramids, the cornice juts out like the brim of a sharp hat, and the corner seems to have been carved out of a single crystal.

   This is Czech Cubism, and Prague is the only city in the world where Cubism stepped out of the paintings and into architecture on this scale. Around 1911, a group of young Czech architects, inspired by Picasso and Braque in Paris, decided that a building, too, could be broken into planes and light. The most radical of them was Josef Chochol, and you have just walked past the proof. Down by the river, his Kovařovic villa, with its faceted facade and the triangular patterns of its garden and fence, and his triple house on the embankment, all three built within a couple of years of each other around 1912 and 1913.

   Here, in Neklanova, he had a tight, awkward corner plot. So he turned the corner into the show: a sculpted, faceted edge with diamond shapes under the cornice, so that the house changes character as the light moves across it during the day.

   The movement was astonishingly short. The First World War put an end to most building in 1914, and after it the style mutated into the rounder rondo-cubism of the young republic before giving way to functionalism. For decades these houses were simply flats, unloved, grey with soot. Only in the later twentieth century did the world wake up to the fact that Prague had something no other city has.

   Look closely at the windows and doorways, too: nothing is quite rectangular, and nothing is quite random. Now leave the houses behind and follow the streets uphill and eastwards, along the foot of the old walls, to the outer gate of the fortress. The citadel you are about to enter is far older than the legends told about it... and far younger than the legends claim.

5. 5. Tábor Gate: Entering the Baroque Citadel

   V Pevnosti, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Walk up to the thick stone gateway with its heavy arch and the brick walls running away on either side. Pass through slowly, and feel the temperature change in the shadow of the vault. You are now inside a fortress.

   Most visitors imagine Vyšehrad as a romantic medieval castle of princesses and prophecies. But almost everything military you see around you, the walls, the bastions, the gates, is baroque, built by the Habsburgs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. After the Thirty Years' War, they turned the old hill into a star-shaped citadel to control Prague and guard the road along the river. This gate was built in the 1650s and named after the road that led south to the town of Tábor.

   The irony of the name is sharp. Tábor was the stronghold of the radical Hussites, and in 1420 Hussite armies besieged Vyšehrad, then held by royal troops, and after a bloody battle at the foot of the hill they took it. The victors smashed and burned much of what Charles IV had built here, the churches, the royal palace, almost everything. For two centuries afterwards Vyšehrad was more a ruin and a small market town than a castle.

   Just beyond this gate, look out for a few fragments of an older wall and gateway. These are the remains of Gothic fortifications, swallowed by the baroque ones like an old coin pressed into a new loaf. Vyšehrad is like that everywhere: layers of history stacked on top of each other, and legends painted over all of them.

   Soldiers were garrisoned here into the early twentieth century, until the fortress lost its military role and passed to the city. Instead of guns and barracks, it got gardens, benches and children on scooters. Walk on along V Pevnosti street, through the second, more elegant gate ahead of you, and look for a small round stone church on your left.

6. 6. Leopold Gate & the Rotunda of St Martin

   V Pevnosti, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Walk through the Leopold Gate, with its rusticated stone and carved decoration, and stop just beyond it. On your left stands a tiny round church of rough stone, with a conical roof, a small apse and a little lantern on top. It looks almost like a toy. It is the oldest building still standing in Prague.

   The Rotunda of Saint Martin was built in the second half of the eleventh century, at a time when Prague Castle was mostly wood and earth. This was the age of Vratislav II, who in 1085 became the first Czech ruler to hold the title of king, and who moved his court from Prague Castle here to Vyšehrad. For a few decades, this hill was the seat of power in Bohemia, with a royal palace, a chapter of canons and a great basilica.

   The rotunda survived almost everything that came after. When the Hussites devastated Vyšehrad, it came through, perhaps because it was simply too small to bother with. Under the Habsburg garrison it became a gunpowder store and then a storehouse, which saved it from being demolished. In the 1870s it was restored and returned to church use, and services are held in it again.

   The Leopold Gate you just walked through is a very different creature: built in the 1670s, named after Emperor Leopold I, and designed to impress rather than to defend. Between the two of them, the round chapel and the swaggering gate, lie six hundred years of Central European history.

   Romanesque rotundas like this one are a Czech speciality. Scattered across Bohemia and Moravia, they are the oldest stone churches in the country. This one is the elder of the Prague family. Now walk on into the heart of the fortress, and bear right towards the northern ramparts and the Brick Gate, where a door leads into the hill itself.

7. 7. Casemates & the Gorlice Hall: Statues in the Dark

   V Pevnosti 159/5b, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Stand by the Brick Gate on the northern ramparts and look at the heavy walls. Inside them, invisible from here, runs a network of brick-vaulted corridors, the casemates, built for soldiers to move along the fortress under cover, out of reach of enemy cannon.

   The passages are narrow, damp and long, lit only where the guided tours go. At their end they open into something you would never expect inside a hill: Gorlice, a huge vaulted hall, built as a shelter and gathering place for the garrison, big enough to hold whole companies of soldiers, with shafts in the vault letting in a little grey daylight from above.

   And standing in that hall, in the half-light, are saints. These are original baroque statues from Charles Bridge, carved around 1700. Centuries of rain, frost and smoke were eating the soft sandstone, so they were taken down and replaced with copies, and some of the originals found shelter here. The ones crowds photograph on the bridge are mostly faithful replicas. The real ones are here, under the earth of Vyšehrad.

   There is something strange about meeting them in the dark, after seeing them on the bridge against the sky. Up close you can see what the weather did: worn faces, broken fingers, folds of stone robes eaten away like old soap. They look less like monuments and more like very old people resting after a long life outdoors.

   The casemates had other lives too. In the twentieth century parts of the hill were used as storage and as shelters, and walking these corridors you can easily imagine why. Back out in the light, turn towards the twin spires of the basilica, the ones you saw from the river at the start of the walk. Somewhere on the grass beside it lie three heavy pieces of stone, and the devil is supposed to have put them there.

8. 8. Basilica of Sts Peter and Paul & the Devil's Column

   K Rotundě 10, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Look up at the two openwork spires of the basilica, needle-sharp against the sky, and then look down at the grass near the church. There, behind a low rail, lie three chunky pieces of stone, broken from a single column. Prague calls them the Devil's Column.

   The legend goes like this. A priest of Vyšehrad, deep in sin, made a wager with the devil: if the devil could bring a column from Saint Peter's in Rome before the priest finished saying mass, the priest's soul was his. The devil flew off. But Saint Peter, the patron of this very church, took pity on the priest and ducked the devil three times in the sea on his way back. When the devil arrived, soaked and too late, he hurled the column at the church in fury. It smashed through the roof and broke into three pieces... and here they lie.

   Historians are less dramatic. The stones may be the remains of an older building, or even part of a giant sundial. But Praguers have never let mere geology spoil a good story, and children are still brought here to count the pieces.

   The basilica itself is far older than it looks. King Vratislav II founded a great church to Saints Peter and Paul here in the 1070s, and it was rebuilt again and again: Romanesque, Gothic, baroque. The building you see today is the work of the late nineteenth century, when the Czech national revival wanted its holy hill to look properly medieval. The two spires were only finished in 1903. Inside, the walls are covered in Art Nouveau paintings of saints and flowers, a surprise behind such a severe Gothic face.

   For centuries, this basilica was the church of the Vyšehrad chapter, one of the most powerful clerical bodies in Bohemia, and it was the canons of the chapter who, in the nineteenth century, turned their small parish graveyard into something much greater. Walk round to the side of the basilica and through the gate into the cemetery. Speak a little more quietly there.

9. 9. Vyšehrad Cemetery & Slavín: Where the Nation Sleeps

   K Rotundě 10, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Walk slowly between the graves. The arcades along the walls, the carved angels, the mosaics, the sculpted portraits... this is less a cemetery than an open-air gallery, and almost every name on the stones is one a Czech child learns at school.

   In the 1860s, patriots of the national revival decided that the Czech nation needed a resting place for its greatest sons and daughters, a Pantheon under the open sky. The little parish graveyard of Vyšehrad, on the hill of legends, was the obvious choice. The writer Božena Němcová, whose novel The Grandmother every Czech knows, was already buried here, in 1862. The poet Jan Neruda followed, and the composer Bedřich Smetana in 1884.

   Under the arcade lies Antonín Dvořák, who died in 1904, the composer of the New World Symphony, with a bust above his grave. Further on lies Karel Čapek, whose play R.U.R. gave the world the word robot, and who died on Christmas Day 1938, weeks after Munich had carved up his country. And near the basilica rises Slavín, the great common tomb crowned by a winged figure, built around 1890 and bearing the words: though they are dead, they still speak. More than fifty artists and scientists lie inside, among them the painter Alfons Mucha, who died in 1939, his health broken after interrogation by the Gestapo.

   In 1939, under the occupation, the remains of the Romantic poet Karel Hynek Mácha were brought here from the Sudetenland, and his reburial turned into a silent demonstration of national feeling. Fifty years later, on 17 November 1989, the student march that ended in the beatings on Národní třída came first to this cemetery, to Mácha's grave, to light candles.

   Smetana gave this hill its music, too: Vyšehrad is the first movement of his cycle My Country, opening with two harps, like a bard tuning up. By tradition, on 12 May, the anniversary of his death, the Prague Spring festival opens with the whole cycle. Now leave by the far gate and walk south through the park, past Myslbek's giant statues, to the edge of the cliff above the river.

10. 10. Libuše's Bath & the Ramparts: Where Prague Was Prophesied

    Štulcova, 128 00 Praha 2, Czechia

    Walk to the edge of the ramparts and look over. Far below, the Vltava bends past the rock, trains rattle into the tunnel, and in the distance, on its own hill, sits Prague Castle. Right at your feet, clinging to the cliff, are the ruined walls of a small Gothic tower. Its name is Libuše's Bath.

    The legend begins with a princess. Libuše, wise and able to see the future, ruled the Czechs from a castle on this hill. When her men grumbled at being governed by a woman, she sent her white horse into the countryside to find her a husband, and it stopped before a ploughman named Přemysl, working his field. He became her husband and the founder of the Přemyslid dynasty, which ruled Bohemia for four centuries.

    And one day, standing on a cliff over the Vltava, Libuše fell into a trance and spoke her most famous prophecy: I see a great city, whose glory will touch the stars. She told her people to go into the forest and build a castle where they found a man making the threshold of a house. Threshold in Czech is práh... and so, the story goes, Prague was named.

    Folk tradition added a darker detail. They said the princess took lovers and bathed with them here, and that the men who displeased her went down through a trapdoor into the river. A wonderful story, and almost certainly nonsense. The tower was built centuries after any Libuše could have lived, as part of the fortifications. Archaeologists add, politely, that the hill fort itself dates from the tenth century, which makes it younger than Prague Castle across the river.

    But behind you, in the park, stand the heroes you met in name at the very start: Libuše and Přemysl, Ctirad and Šárka, Záboj and Slavoj, Lumír and Song, carried up here from Palacký Bridge after the war, still posing grandly for a nation that loves them whether or not they existed. So stay a while on the wall, with the river below and the Castle on the horizon. This is where Prague's story begins... and, for today, where your walk ends.