The city beneath your feet

Prague often feels like a city that survived intact.

Its towers, cobbled streets and grand façades suggest permanence.

But beneath some of its busiest streets and most familiar buildings lie places that have vanished almost completely.

At Můstek, a buried medieval bridge still marks the entrance to an older city.

On Jindřišská, Prague’s main post office stands on a site once home to one of the first botanical gardens in Europe.

And before Riegrovy Sady, Kanálka drew visitors to one of Prague’s most celebrated pleasure parks … created by the son of the Sardinian ambassador.

Cities not only grow. They bury themselves.

Join me and historian Alex Went for a tour of the city beneath your feet.

Můstek is now one of Prague’s busiest pedestrian corridors, but it once marked the edge of the Old Town. Beneath Můstek lies the memory of the bridge (most) and moat (příkop) that once defined a fortified city.

Today it’s home to Prague’s main post office. Before that came a tobacco factory, a monastery, and originally one of the first botanical gardens in Europe, founded by Charles IV’s personal physician and pharmacist, Angelus of Florence. What now feels like an ordinary institutional building sits on a site layered with centuries of reinvention.

Long before Riegrovy Sady, this part of Prague was home to Kanálka - a celebrated public garden and pleasure park created by the Sardinian philanthropist, scientist - and apparent anti-Semite - Count Joseph Emanuel Malabaila di Canale. It was a place of botany, leisure and innovation, before disappearing beneath Prague’s expanding cityscape.

To join one of Alex Went’s fabulous tours, go to Prague Story. Alex is also a talented website designer. For more, see Websites Wanted.

The hidden history of the Czech capital is not only medieval. Read how one of the defining acts of resistance to the Nazis is still etched into Prague’s streets, churches and squares:

Anthropoid

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May 29

In Prague, one of the most audacious assassinations of the Second World War - the killing of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich - unfolded in broad daylight.