Wenceslas Square to the Dancing House: Prague's Century of Revolutions, 1918–1989

Radio barricades, a balcony that toppled a regime, the hands on Národní třída and a crypt that held out against the SS: the New Town where Prague won, lost and won back its freedom

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

1. 1. Czech Radio Building: Calling All Czechs

   Vinohradská 12, 120 00 Praha 2, Czechia

   Stand on the pavement of Vinohradská street and look at the long, sober office front of Czech Radio, with its plaques and its fresh flowers. Nothing about it looks heroic. It looks like a building where people file reports and drink bad coffee... and twice in the twentieth century, the fate of the city was decided on this pavement.

   The first time was the morning of 5 May 1945. Prague had been under German occupation for six years, and Hitler was already dead. That morning the announcers stopped using the compulsory German and spoke only Czech. Then came the call that every Czech grandparent can still recite: Calling all Czechs! The broadcasters asked for help, and armed civilians, policemen and former soldiers fought their way through the corridors to hold the studios.

   Within hours, barricades were rising all over Prague, built from paving stones, trams and furniture. The Prague Uprising lasted four days. The radio kept transmitting through the shooting, in English and Russian as well as Czech, begging the Allies to come. The Red Army reached the city on 9 May, and the uprising cost well over a thousand Czech lives.

   The second time came twenty-three years later. In the early hours of 21 August 1968, the armies of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring. The radio read out the statement condemning the invasion, and when the tanks arrived on this street, thousands of unarmed people blocked their way. Buses were pushed across the road, a truck caught fire, houses burned. More than a dozen people were killed in the streets around this building that morning.

   And the radio did not fall silent. Its staff slipped away and kept broadcasting from improvised hiding places for days, telling soldiers and citizens alike what was really happening. Now walk back towards the great domed building at the top of Wenceslas Square. It carries its own memory of that August morning... in the stone itself.

2. 2. National Museum: A Palace for a Nation Without a State

   Václavské náměstí 68, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Climb a few steps towards the great neo-Renaissance palace that closes the top of Wenceslas Square, and turn around. The whole avenue falls away below you, nearly 750 metres of it, and this building is the full stop at the end of the sentence.

   The paradox is in the date. The National Museum opened in 1891, and at that time there was no Czech state at all. Bohemia was a province of the Habsburg monarchy, German was the language of power, and Czech was something many educated families spoke mainly in the kitchen. So the patriots of the nineteenth century built a palace for a nation that existed mostly on paper... dictionaries, poems, history books, and this. Inside, under the glass dome, is a Pantheon lined with statues and busts of the great Czechs, a national hall of fame decades before there was a nation to govern.

   Now look closely at the facade, around the columns and the windows. On 21 August 1968, Soviet soldiers on this square opened fire on the building with machine guns. Nobody has ever fully explained why. Some say they mistook it for the parliament or the radio; others think it was simply a show of force. The bullet scars were filled with patches of stone in a slightly different shade... and when the museum was restored, the restorers chose not to hide them.

   That restoration took years. The building closed in 2011 and reopened in 2018, the hundredth anniversary of Czechoslovak independence, with the dome bright again and the Pantheon cleaned. An underground passage now links it to the glass-and-steel building next door, once the parliament of Communist Czechoslovakia and today part of the same museum.

   Before you go down the square, stand still for a moment in front of the steps. Just below them, in the pavement, there is something small and bronze that most people walk straight across. Look down at your feet as you head towards the statue of the saint on horseback.

3. 3. St Wenceslas Statue & the Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc Memorial

   Václavské náměstí, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Look down first. Set into the pavement below the museum steps is a bronze cross, and the ground around it seems to swell and buckle, as if the stones themselves had been pushed up from beneath. It bears two names: Jan Palach and Jan Zajíc.

   On 16 January 1969, five months into the Soviet occupation, Jan Palach, a twenty-year-old student of the Faculty of Arts, set himself on fire near this spot. He was not protesting the tanks alone. He was protesting the resignation creeping through the country, the way people were already learning to look away. He died three days later. His funeral became a silent march of tens of thousands. On 25 February, an eighteen-year-old student, Jan Zajíc, did the same in a passage on this square. Both are remembered here, side by side.

   Now raise your eyes to the bronze rider. This is Saint Wenceslas, the tenth-century duke of Bohemia, by the sculptor Josef Václav Myslbek, who worked on it for some three decades. Around him stand four other Czech patron saints, and on the pedestal is a prayer asking him not to let us perish, nor those who come after. Myslbek made the duke calm, not triumphant... a guardian, not a conqueror.

   That is why this horse's tail is Prague's meeting point, the place where you say, under the horse, and everybody knows. Crowds gathered here in October 1918 when independence was proclaimed. And in January 1989, on the twentieth anniversary of Palach's death, people came to lay flowers and were dispersed with water cannon and batons. Václav Havel was arrested that week and sentenced to nine months in prison. Within the year, he would be president.

   Keep that image of the calm duke in your mind... you will need it soon. Now walk down the left-hand side of the square, the side of the even numbers, to number 36, and look up for a modest balcony on its upper floor.

4. 4. Melantrich Balcony & Hotel Evropa: A Square Full of Keys

   Václavské náměstí 36, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Find number 36 and look up at the balcony on its upper floor. It is not grand, not baroque, not even very large. And yet in November 1989 it was the most important stage in Central Europe.

   The building belonged to the Melantrich publishing house, which printed the newspaper of the Socialist Party, one of the small parties allowed to exist beside the Communists. After the police attacked the students on 17 November, the newspaper's staff did something extraordinary: they offered this balcony, and its loudspeakers, to the opposition.

   From 20 November, the square filled every afternoon. Hundreds of thousands of people stood from the museum all the way down to where you are, in the cold. On 21 November, Václav Havel spoke from the balcony. Then, on 24 November, a thin, elderly man stepped out beside him: Alexander Dubček, the face of the Prague Spring, banished for twenty years to a job in the forestry service. The roar was deafening. That same evening, the Communist Party leadership resigned.

   And then there were the keys. Hundreds of thousands of people took out their key rings and shook them over their heads, all at once. It was the sound of a bell, of a door being unlocked, and also a message to the men at the top: your time is up, go home. By 29 December, Havel was president.

   Now turn around and look across the square at the most beautiful facade on it, the Hotel Evropa, all gilded nymphs and stained glass, finished in the early 1900s. It is pure Art Nouveau, a monument to the confident, coffee-drinking Prague that existed before any of these revolutions. When you are ready, slip into the arcades a few doors along, which lead into the Lucerna palace. Somewhere inside, Saint Wenceslas is waiting on his horse again... and he is having a much worse day than on the square.

5. 5. Lucerna Palace: The Havels' Arcade and the Upside-Down Horse

   Vodičkova 36, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Step inside the passage and let your eyes adjust to the dim light, the marble, the old cinema posters, the shops tucked into the walls. Then walk to where the arcade opens under a dome and look up. There is Saint Wenceslas again, in full armour, sitting proudly on his horse... and the horse is hanging upside down from the ceiling by its legs, tongue lolling, very dead.

   This is the work of David Černý, Prague's most reliable provocateur, and it has hung here since the end of the 1990s. It is a joke about the statue you just saw, about national myths, and, many people say, about politicians riding things that died long ago. Černý has never offered a single answer, which is exactly the point.

   The building around it is just as interesting. Lucerna was built in stages from 1907 to the early 1920s by an entrepreneur called Vácslav Havel, and it was one of the first buildings in Prague to use reinforced concrete on this scale. He filled it with a cinema, which opened in 1909 and still screens films, a grand ballroom in the basement, cafés and shops. Between the wars, this was where Prague danced. His grandson, born in 1936, was named Václav.

   After the Communist takeover in 1948, the family lost everything. The palace was confiscated, and young Václav Havel, branded a bourgeois child, was barred from the schools he wanted. He became a stagehand, a playwright, a dissident and a prisoner... and in 1989, the president. The family got Lucerna back after the revolution, and Havel later sold his share... a president, it seems, did not need to be a landlord as well.

   Before you leave, notice the paternoster lifts and the long arcades running off in several directions, a whole network of covered streets inside the block. Leave by the exit onto Vodičkova street, cross over, and look for the passage that leads into a walled garden hidden in the middle of the block.

6. 6. Franciscan Garden & Our Lady of the Snows

   Jungmannovo náměstí 18, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Walk in through the gate and the noise of Wenceslas Square simply switches off. Rose beds, clipped hedges, benches, a little fountain, and above the wall a church so tall and so oddly short that it looks as if somebody built the head of a giant and forgot the body.

   That is almost exactly what happened. In 1347 the emperor Charles IV founded the church of Our Lady of the Snows to mark his coronation, and planned it to be larger than Saint Vitus Cathedral at the Castle. Only the choir was ever finished. Even so, its vault rises around thirty-three metres, the highest church interior in Prague.

   Seventy years later, this church had a different fame. Its preacher, Jan Želivský, led a procession from here in July 1419 to the New Town Hall, where the crowd threw the councillors out of the windows. That first defenestration lit the fuse of the Hussite wars. Prague has always had a habit of settling things by window.

   The garden itself belongs to the friars, the Franciscans who came here around 1604 and planted herbs and vegetables behind these walls. In April 1950 the Communist state raided the monasteries of the whole country in a single night and sent the monks to internment. The garden was opened to the public, a little park carved out of a confiscated cloister. After 1989, the Franciscans came back, and the garden stayed open... a rare case of the regime's leftovers turning out to be a gift.

   Sit for a minute and look up at that impossible wall of a church. It has survived Hussites, Swedes, Habsburgs, Nazis and Communists, and it is still, after almost seven centuries, waiting for its missing nave. Now leave by the far side, cross Jungmannovo náměstí and follow Národní třída, National Avenue, towards the river. Halfway along, under an arcade, look for a group of bronze hands.

7. 7. Národní třída: The Hands of 17 November 1989

   Národní 16, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Step under the arcade of number 16 and look at the wall. A bronze plaque, and on it a cluster of raised hands, some making the V for victory, some simply open, with a date: 17 November 1989. There are usually candles on the ledge below, and on the anniversary the whole arcade glows.

   The date is a double one. On 17 November 1939, the Nazis closed all Czech universities after student protests, executed nine student leaders and sent well over a thousand students to concentration camps. Fifty years later, students organised an officially permitted march to remember it. It began at Albertov, wound up to the cemetery on Vyšehrad, and then, as darkness fell, thousands turned towards Wenceslas Square.

   They never got there. Here on Národní třída, riot police closed the street from both ends. The students sat down, lit candles, held up flowers and their empty hands and chanted that they had no weapons. Then the police moved in with batons, forcing them through a corridor of beatings. Hundreds were injured. That night a rumour spread that a student had been killed. It was false, and how it started is argued about to this day... but it brought the actors, the students and then the whole country out on strike.

   Just a few doors along, at number 22, is the Café Louvre, opened in 1902 and among the grand cafés of Austro-Hungarian Prague. It counts Franz Kafka's circle among its old regulars. The Communists closed it after 1948, and it reopened only after the revolution that began on this very pavement. Prague likes these coincidences, and its coffee.

   Today, 17 November is a national holiday, the Day of Struggle for Freedom and Democracy, honouring both generations of students at once. Now carry on along Národní třída, all the way to the river, where a golden-roofed theatre faces a famous café across the street.

8. 8. National Theatre & Café Slavia: The Stage and the Stalls

   Národní 2, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Stand on the corner by the river, with the golden-crowned roof of the National Theatre on one side and the big windows of Café Slavia on the other. Across the water, the Castle sits on its hill like a stage set. You could not design a better view if you tried.

   Above the theatre's stage arch are the words Národ sobě, the nation to itself. They are a statement of accounts. The theatre was paid for largely by public collections, by ordinary people in the Czech lands who gave what they could. It opened in June 1881... and that August, before it was even finished, it burned down. The response was a second collection. Within weeks the money was raised again, and the rebuilt theatre opened in 1883.

   Theatre in this country has always been politics by other means. In January 1977, the regime gathered actors and singers here to sign a declaration against Charter 77, the human rights manifesto co-written by a playwright called Václav Havel. Many signed out of fear, and some never forgave themselves. Twelve years later, in November 1989, the theatres of Prague went on strike, cancelled their performances and opened their stages to public debates instead.

   And across the street, at Café Slavia, open since 1884, the audience has been watching for well over a century. Composers and poets sat here, among them the Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert. Under Communism, Havel and his friends met at these tables, knowing perfectly well that the man reading a newspaper two tables away was probably reporting on them. On the wall hangs Viktor Oliva's painting The Absinthe Drinker, a man and a pale green ghost of a woman, the café's eternal regular.

   Now walk south along the embankment, with the river on your right and the island of Slovanský ostrov just offshore. Look for a crisp white building of the 1920s standing beside an old water tower with an onion dome.

9. 9. Mánes Building: White Modernism on the Water

   Masarykovo nábřeží 250, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia

   Look at the long, low, white building stretched along the water, all horizontal lines and ribbon windows, and then at the stout old water tower beside it with its baroque onion dome. Two Pragues, centuries apart, standing shoulder to shoulder... and the young one is not at all embarrassed.

   The white building is the exhibition hall of the Mánes Union of Fine Arts, designed by the architect Otakar Novotný and completed around 1930. The society was founded in 1887 and named after the painter Josef Mánes, and long before it had a home of its own, it was dragging Prague into the modern world. In 1902 it brought Auguste Rodin and his sculptures to the city. In 1905 it showed the paintings of Edvard Munch, and a whole generation of young Czech painters walked out of that show changed for ever.

   When independence came in 1918, the new republic wanted to look forward, not back. Czechoslovakia between the wars was one of the most industrialised countries in Europe, and by the late 1930s a democracy surrounded by dictatorships, and its architects answered with buildings like this: functional, clean, white, open to light and water. Even the embankment you are standing on carries the name of its first president, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk.

   That confidence lasted barely twenty years. Munich came in 1938, the occupation in 1939, and after 1948 a Communist regime that preferred heavier, more obedient styles. But the building outlived them all, a stubborn white rectangle in a grey century.

   The water tower beside it, called Šítkovská, once pumped river water to the fountains of the New Town, and it is far older than anything else on this walk. Now turn left, away from the river, into Resslova street. A short way up the hill stands a baroque church with a small window at pavement level, surrounded by the marks of bullets.

10. 10. Cathedral of Sts Cyril and Methodius: The Crypt of the Paratroopers

    Resslova 9a, 120 00 Praha 2, Czechia

    Stop on the pavement of Resslova street, beside the baroque church, and look at the small window of the crypt just above the ground. The stone around it is pocked and gouged by bullets. Above it, a memorial plaque, and often a few flowers and candles. Take a moment. What happened behind that window deserves it.

    On 27 May 1942, two Czechoslovak soldiers trained in Britain and parachuted into the occupied country, the Slovak Jozef Gabčík and the Czech Jan Kubiš, ambushed the car of Reinhard Heydrich in the northern suburb of Libeň. Heydrich was the acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. He died of his wounds on 4 June. It was Operation Anthropoid, the only successful assassination of a top Nazi leader of the war.

    Gabčík, Kubiš and five other paratroopers hid here in the crypt of this church, sheltered by the Orthodox clergy. Then one of their own comrades, Karel Čurda, went to the Gestapo. Before dawn on 18 June, hundreds of SS troops surrounded the church. Three men fought from the gallery for about two hours. The other four held the crypt as the Germans tried tear gas, then fire hoses to flood it. None of the seven was taken alive.

    The revenge was terrible. The villages of Lidice and Ležáky were wiped from the map, their men shot, their women and children sent to camps. Bishop Gorazd, who had taken responsibility for sheltering the soldiers, was executed with the priests of this church. Thousands of Czechs died in the reprisals. Historians still debate the price; few doubt the courage.

    The church itself was built in the 1730s for the Catholics as Saint Charles Borromeo and handed to the Czechoslovak Orthodox Church in the 1930s. The crypt is a quiet national memorial now. When you are ready, walk back down Resslova towards the river, to the corner of Jiráskovo náměstí, where a building appears to be dancing.

11. 11. Dancing House: Ginger and Fred on a Bomb Site

    Jiráskovo náměstí 6, 120 00 Praha 2, Czechia

    Stand on the corner and look at the two towers leaning into each other: one of glass, pinched at the waist like a woman in a swirling skirt, the other of solid concrete, upright, with a metal mop of a head. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, frozen mid-turn above the river. Prague calls it simply the Dancing House.

    For half a century this corner was a gap. On 14 February 1945, American bombers, lost in cloud and believing they were over Dresden, dropped their bombs on Prague. Hundreds of people died, and among the buildings destroyed was the one that stood here. Under Communism, the ruin was cleared and the lot stayed empty, a missing tooth in a row of elegant nineteenth-century facades.

    Next door, in the apartment building his grandfather had built on the embankment, lived a man who looked at that gap every day: Václav Havel. After the revolution, he encouraged the Czech architect Vlado Milunić to think about something bold for the site. Milunić brought in the American Frank Gehry, and the building was finished in 1996.

    Prague hated it at first. A city of baroque domes and Gothic spires was suddenly asked to accept a building that looked as if it had had a few too many. Letters were written, tempers lost. And then, slowly, the city fell for it. Today it is on postcards beside the Castle, and nobody remembers being angry.

    And that is the right place to end. You started at a radio station calling for help, and you walked through occupation, invasion, two burning students, a balcony, a sea of jingling keys, and a crypt that would not surrender. This building is what came after: a free country, a little giddy, deciding that it was allowed to dance. The river is in front of you and the Castle is on the far hill... take your time getting there.