A History of Prague: From Ancient Settlement to the Velvet Revolution

How ten centuries of kings, emperors, occupiers and revolutionaries built the city you are about to explore — and where to see each chapter in person today

Prague is one of the few major European cities to have survived the 20th century largely intact — no carpet bombing, no wartime demolition, no postwar urban renewal on the scale that levelled so much of Berlin, Warsaw or London. The result is a city where you can stand on a medieval bridge, look up at a Romanesque tower, walk through a Baroque garden and emerge onto a Communist-era square within the space of an hour. The history is not behind glass. It is the city itself.

The Vltava basin has been inhabited for an almost incomprehensible span of time. Archaeological finds near Šárka valley in Prague’s west date human presence in the area to the Palaeolithic era — roughly 500,000 years ago — placing it among the most ancient continuously inhabited areas in Central Europe. These were not yet settlements in any meaningful sense, but hunting and gathering sites along a river that provided fresh water, fish and a natural corridor through the forested landscape.

By the Neolithic period around 4,500 BCE, farming communities had begun to establish themselves permanently along the Vltava. The remains of Neolithic longhouses have been found in several Prague districts, suggesting a settled agricultural community well before the emergence of recorded history. The Bronze Age brought more sophisticated societies and trade links across Central Europe; the Iron Age brought the Celtic Boii tribe, from whom Bohemia — Boiohaemum in Latin — takes its name. The Boii were a significant Celtic power across much of what is now Czech territory, establishing settlements and trading extensively with Mediterranean civilisations.

The Boii were displaced or absorbed around the first century BCE by Germanic tribes moving west, who were themselves eventually replaced by Slavic peoples migrating from the east during the 5th and 6th centuries CE. These Slavic settlers are the direct ancestors of the Czech people. By the 7th century, a powerful Slavic state — the Empire of Samo — had unified much of Central Europe briefly under a single ruler, demonstrating that organised political structures were forming in the region long before the Přemyslid dynasty that would go on to shape Prague.

Prague enters recorded history in the 9th century with the founding of Prague Castle. According to Czech legend, the castle was founded by Princess Libuše, a prophetic ruler who stood on the Vyšehrad cliff above the Vltava and declared that she saw a great city whose glory would touch the stars — Praha, from the word for threshold. Her descendants, the Přemyslid dynasty, would rule Bohemia for over four centuries.

The earliest documented Prague Castle dates from around 870 CE, when Bořivoj I — the first historically verified Přemyslid duke and the first Czech ruler to convert to Christianity — built a wooden fortification on the Hradčany hill above the Vltava. The Romanesque St. George’s Basilica, still standing within the castle complex today, was founded in 920 by his grandson Vratislaus I. Christianity spread rapidly through Bohemia under Přemyslid rule, transforming the tribe’s traditional beliefs and connecting Bohemia to the broader political and cultural structures of medieval Europe.

The Přemyslids’ most famous ruler was Wenceslas I — Václav in Czech — who became Duke of Bohemia around 921 CE. His murder by his own brother Boleslaus in 935 transformed him into a martyr and patron saint of Bohemia, the figure celebrated in the Christmas carol. His bones rest in St. Vitus Cathedral to this day. The Good King Wenceslas of the carol is largely a Victorian invention, but the historical Václav — a Christian ruler in a pagan-influenced kingdom, murdered for his faith and his political moderation — was a genuine and complex figure whose legacy shaped Czech national identity for centuries.

Under later Přemyslid rulers, particularly Přemysl Otakar II (ruled 1253–1278), Bohemia became one of the most powerful kingdoms in Central Europe. Otakar II controlled territory from Bohemia to the Adriatic, invited German settlers to develop Bohemian towns, and transformed Prague from a ducal seat into a major European capital. His reign ended in defeat and death at the Battle of Marchfeld in 1278 — but the kingdom and the city he built outlasted him. The Přemyslid line ended in 1306 with the murder of Václav III, leaving the Bohemian throne to be contested by foreign dynasties.

No single ruler shaped Prague as fundamentally as Charles IV. Born in Prague in 1316, educated in Paris, and crowned King of Bohemia in 1346 and Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, Charles transformed his capital into one of the great cities of medieval Europe — and left a physical legacy that visitors are still exploring today.

Charles’s building programme was extraordinary in scale and ambition. In 1344 he upgraded the Bishopric of Prague to an Archbishopric and immediately commissioned the rebuilding of the Romanesque cathedral on the castle hill into the vast Gothic St. Vitus Cathedral, work on which continued for centuries after his death. In 1357 he ordered the construction of Charles Bridge — the stone bridge that replaced an earlier structure and has carried the city’s traffic, pilgrims and now tourists across the Vltava ever since. In 1348 he founded the New Town (Nové Město), tripling Prague’s urban area in a single act of city planning, and in the same year established Charles University — the first university in Central Europe, still operating today as Charles University Prague.

Under Charles, Prague became the third largest city in Europe after Rome and Constantinople, with a population of around 40,000. The royal court attracted scholars, artists and craftsmen from across Europe. The Gothic style that defines so much of Prague’s character — the soaring windows, the ribbed vaults, the spire-punctuated skyline — is largely a product of Charles’s reign and the two generations of builders who followed his commissions.

Charles was also politically shrewd. His Golden Bull of 1356 established the constitutional law of the Holy Roman Empire and enshrined the King of Bohemia as one of its seven Electors — guaranteeing Bohemia a permanent and significant role in imperial politics. When he died in 1378, Prague had been transformed from a regional capital into an imperial city. Almost everything that draws visitors to Prague today has its roots in Charles’s reign.

Thirty-seven years after Charles IV’s death, Prague became the epicentre of one of medieval Europe’s most dramatic religious upheavals. Jan Hus — a Czech theologian, philosopher and preacher at Charles University — began challenging the authority and corruption of the Catholic Church in the early 15th century, preaching in Czech (rather than Latin) in the Bethlehem Chapel in Old Town and attracting mass popular followings. His central argument — that the Church had become corrupt, that the Bible rather than papal authority should be the foundation of Christian life, and that ordinary people had the right to receive both bread and wine at Communion — was a century ahead of the Protestant Reformation.

Hus was summoned to the Council of Constance in 1414, promised safe conduct, and burned at the stake as a heretic in July 1415. His execution triggered a Czech national uprising of unprecedented fury. The Hussites — his followers — launched a military campaign that defeated five papal crusades sent against them, humiliating the Holy Roman Empire and the Catholic Church. The Hussite period produced remarkable military innovation (the war wagon technique that revolutionised medieval warfare), a flowering of Czech-language literature, and a deeply rooted tradition of religious and political questioning that runs through Czech culture to this day.

The Hussites also left a mark on Prague’s skyline: the Defenestration of Prague in 1419 — when a Hussite crowd threw Catholic councillors from the windows of New Town Hall — inaugurated the conflict and established the defenestration as a peculiarly Czech political tradition (it would happen again in 1618, launching the Thirty Years War, and in 1948, when the Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk fell from a window after the Communist coup).

After a turbulent 15th century, Prague experienced its second great flowering under Emperor Rudolf II — one of the strangest and most fascinating rulers in European history. Rudolf moved the imperial court from Vienna to Prague Castle in 1583 and transformed it into the most extraordinary intellectual and artistic centre in the world, attracting a court of thinkers, artists, alchemists, magicians, astronomers and naturalists that had no equivalent in Europe.

Rudolf was, by most accounts, mentally unstable, deeply melancholic, politically incompetent and extraordinarily cultivated. He spoke six languages, collected obsessively — his Kunstkammer (cabinet of curiosities) at Prague Castle was the largest in the world, containing thousands of paintings, sculptures, mechanical devices, exotic animals, curiosities from the New World and objects of uncertain purpose — and personally invited the greatest scientists of the age to work at his court.

Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer whose precise planetary observations revolutionised astronomy, came to Prague in 1599 and died here in 1601 — his tomb is in the Týn Church on Old Town Square. Johannes Kepler, Brahe’s successor as Imperial Mathematician, formulated his first two laws of planetary motion while working in Prague, laying the mathematical foundations for modern astronomy. John Dee, the English mathematician and occultist, visited the court. The alchemist Edward Kelley worked here. The physician and botanist Carolus Clusius established one of Europe’s first botanical gardens. Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted his famous composite portrait heads — faces made from fruit, vegetables and flowers — as court painter to Rudolf. The city buzzed with an energy that was part scientific revolution, part Renaissance magic, all conducted under the patronage of an emperor who genuinely did not know where one ended and the other began.

The Golem legend — the clay guardian created by Rabbi Loew to protect Prague’s Jewish community — is set in this era, and while the story is legend, Rabbi Loew was a historical figure whom Rudolf reportedly summoned to the castle for a private audience. The meeting between the Holy Roman Emperor and the Jewish rabbi, two figures at the edge of the known and unknown, somehow epitomises the strangeness and fertility of Rudolf’s Prague.

Rudolf II’s reign ended in humiliation — he was forced to abdicate by his own brother in 1611 — and the political tensions he had avoided confronting exploded within years of his death. On 23 May 1618, Protestant Czech nobles threw two Catholic imperial governors and their secretary from a window of Prague Castle — the second Defenestration of Prague — in protest at the Habsburgs’ violation of Protestant religious freedoms. All three survived the 21-metre fall, landing in a dung heap. Catholics declared it a miracle; Protestants suggested the dung was the explanation. The event sparked the Thirty Years War, the most destructive conflict Europe had seen since the Black Death.

The Czech phase of the war ended decisively and catastrophically at the Battle of White Mountain (Bílá hora) on 8 November 1620 — a short, brutal engagement fought on a plain west of Prague in which the Protestant Czech-Bohemian army was destroyed in under two hours by the Catholic Habsburg forces. Twenty-seven Czech Protestant leaders were publicly executed in Old Town Square on 21 June 1621. The Czech language was suppressed, Protestantism was banned, the Bohemian nobility was replaced by imported Catholic loyalists, and Bohemia was effectively absorbed into the Habsburg Empire. The trauma of White Mountain haunted Czech national consciousness for three centuries — a wound that did not fully close until 1918.

The century and a half following White Mountain transformed Prague’s character fundamentally. The Habsburgs, consolidating their hold on Bohemia, embarked on a massive building programme designed simultaneously to glorify the Church, demonstrate imperial power and physically erase the Protestant built environment. The result was one of the greatest concentrations of Baroque architecture in Europe — the palaces, churches, fountains and garden terraces that give Malá Strana in particular its extraordinary character today.

The Jesuits were the primary instrument of re-Catholicisation. Their Clementinum complex — built in stages from the 1620s on the site of a former Dominican monastery on the eastern bank of the Charles Bridge approach — eventually became one of the largest Baroque building complexes in Europe, housing a library, observatory, chapel and college. The Clementinum Library hall, completed in 1727, is arguably the most beautiful Baroque interior in Prague — a two-storey hall of frescoed ceilings, gilded balconies and floor-to-ceiling books that has been described as one of the most beautiful libraries in the world.

The landscape of Malá Strana was entirely remade during this period. The old Gothic and Renaissance buildings below the castle were replaced by or incorporated into the grand Baroque palaces built for the new Catholic-Habsburg nobility — Wallenstein Palace (1630, the largest Baroque palace in Prague), the Lobkowicz Palace, the Ledebour Garden terraces climbing the castle hill. The church of St. Nicholas in Malá Strana (built 1703–1755), with its massive green dome visible from across the city, is the masterpiece of Czech Baroque architecture and one of the finest Baroque churches in Central Europe.

By 1800, the Czech language was in genuine danger of extinction as a literary and public language. Two centuries of Habsburg rule, forced re-Catholicisation and the cultural suppression following White Mountain had reduced Czech to the language of peasants and servants — German was the language of administration, culture, science and the urban bourgeoisie. The Czech National Revival (Národní obrození) was one of the most remarkable cultural rescue operations in European history: a deliberate, largely intellectual movement to revive, standardise and celebrate the Czech language and Bohemian cultural identity before it disappeared entirely.

The scholar Josef Dobrovský produced the first systematic grammar of the Czech language in 1809. Josef Jungmann compiled a five-volume Czech-German dictionary and translated Paradise Lost into Czech — demonstrating that the language was capable of literary grandeur. The historian František Palacký wrote the first comprehensive history of the Czech nation, providing Bohemia with a narrative of its own past. The composer Bedřich Smetana wrote Má vlast (My Homeland), a cycle of symphonic poems celebrating Bohemia’s landscapes and legends — it is still played at the opening of the annual Prague Spring music festival. Antonín Dvořák took Czech musical themes to international audiences, making Bohemian folk melody known across the world.

The physical expression of the National Revival built some of Prague’s most significant 19th-century landmarks. The National Theatre (Národní divadlo), funded entirely by public subscription and opened in 1881, was the statement that Czech culture demanded its own institution independent of German influence. Its motto — “Národ sobě” (The nation to itself) — is inscribed above the stage. The National Museum at the top of Wenceslas Square, completed in 1890, was the visual anchor of the revival: a Neo-Renaissance palace designed to make Czech history monumental and permanent.

On 28 October 1918, with the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsing in defeat at the end of the First World War, Czechoslovakia declared independence and Prague became the capital of a new democratic republic. The First Republic (První republika) — the two decades between 1918 and 1938 — is remembered in Czech historical memory as a golden age: a genuinely functioning liberal democracy in an interwar Europe rapidly moving towards authoritarianism, led by the philosopher-president Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and his successor Edvard Beneš.

Prague in the 1920s and 1930s was a cosmopolitan, intellectually vibrant city. The German-speaking Jewish community of Prague — Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Egon Erwin Kisch — produced literature of extraordinary power. Czech writers and thinkers — Karel Čapek (who invented the word “robot”), Jaroslav Hašek (author of The Good Soldier Švejk), the poet Jaroslav Seifert (later a Nobel laureate) — gave Czech literature an international voice. Functionalist and Art Deco architecture transformed the streets of Vinohrady, Dejvice and Holešovice. The Bata shoe company made Zlín a model of modern industrial urbanism. Czechoslovakia was, by most measures, one of the ten most developed economies in the world.

It lasted twenty years. In September 1938, Britain and France signed the Munich Agreement, ceding the predominantly German-speaking Sudetenland border regions of Czechoslovakia to Hitler’s Germany without Czech participation in the negotiations. Czechoslovakia was dismembered without firing a shot. In March 1939, the German army occupied Prague.

The Nazi occupation of Prague lasted six years and destroyed communities that had existed in the city for centuries. The Jewish community of Prague — numbering around 56,000 people at the time of the occupation — was systematically deported to the Terezín concentration camp and from there to the death camps. Of Prague’s pre-war Jewish population, fewer than 10,000 survived. The synagogues and cemeteries of Josefov — preserved by the Nazis, paradoxically, as a planned museum to an “extinct race” — stand today as the testament of a community that was almost annihilated in six years.

The Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich — one of the principal architects of the Holocaust, the man who chaired the Wannsee Conference at which the Final Solution was formalised — was appointed to rule the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in September 1941. He was mortally wounded on 27 May 1942 in a spectacular operation: Czech paratroopers trained in Britain, parachuted into Bohemia by the RAF, ambushed his open-topped car in the Prague suburb of Libeň. Heydrich died of his wounds on 4 June. The reprisals were devastating — the villages of Lidice and Ležáky were completely destroyed, their male populations shot, women and children sent to concentration camps. The seven paratroopers were eventually cornered in the Cathedral of St. Cyril and Methodius in New Town, where they died after a six-hour siege rather than surrender. Their memorial is one of the most important sites of Czech wartime resistance.

Prague itself survived the war largely physically intact — unlike most Central European capitals, it was not heavily bombed (though an American air raid killed over 700 civilians in February 1945 in a navigation error). The city was liberated by Soviet forces on 9 May 1945, a day after Germany’s formal surrender — the Prague Uprising of 5–8 May, in which Czech civilians rose against the German garrison, had already begun the liberation at the cost of around 1,700 Czech lives.

Liberation in 1945 brought Soviet influence in its wake. In the elections of 1946, the Czechoslovak Communist Party won 38% of the vote — the largest share of any party, reflecting genuine popular support and the post-war association of the Soviet Union with liberation. In February 1948, the Communists seized complete power in a coup, the non-Communist members of government resigned, and Czechoslovakia became a one-party state aligned with the Soviet bloc. The Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk — son of the First Republic’s founding president — was found dead in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry on 10 March 1948. The official verdict was suicide; most historians believe he was murdered.

The 1950s in Czechoslovakia were among the most repressive in the Eastern Bloc. Show trials and executions targeted not just democratic politicians but Communist Party members accused of “Titoism” or “Zionism.” The economy was restructured on Soviet lines; private enterprise was abolished; the Catholic Church was persecuted; intellectuals who did not conform were imprisoned, exiled to mines, or silenced. Prague’s physical environment changed too: the Stalinist Stalin Monument — the largest statue of Stalin in the world — was built on Letná Hill above the Vltava in 1955 and demolished just seven years later after Stalin’s reputation collapsed following Khrushchev’s 1956 secret speech. Its concrete plinth, now hosting a giant metronome, remains.

The 1960s brought a gradual thaw. The reformist Alexander Dubček became First Secretary of the Communist Party in January 1968 and launched a reform programme he called “socialism with a human face” — relaxing censorship, rehabilitating victims of 1950s purges, opening political debate. The Prague Spring of 1968 was a brief extraordinary moment: a Communist state attempting to democratise itself from within, with the support of most of its population. On the night of 20–21 August 1968, Soviet tanks crossed the Czechoslovak border. By morning, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops were in Czechoslovakia. The Prague Spring was over.

The two decades of Normalisation that followed — the regime of Gustáv Husák, who replaced Dubček and systematically reversed every reform — produced a peculiar Czech cultural response. Official public life became performative compliance; real intellectual and cultural life went underground into samizdat literature, private apartments, banned rock bands and a parallel society that the authorities could monitor but never quite suppress. Václav Havel — playwright, essayist and future president — wrote his most important works during this period, including his essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which circulated in samizdat and became one of the foundational texts of Central European dissident thought.

By the autumn of 1989, the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were falling in rapid succession — Poland, Hungary, East Germany. In Czechoslovakia, the process had barely begun. On 17 November 1989, a student demonstration in Prague — officially permitted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Nazi suppression of Czech student protest in 1939 — was violently broken up by riot police on Národní třída. The images of students beaten on the ground spread quickly through a population that had been holding its breath for months. The following day, theatres across Prague went on strike. Within days, mass demonstrations were filling Wenceslas Square: 200,000 people, then 500,000, keys jingling in the air — the Czech symbol of opening a locked door.

Václav Havel — who had spent years in prison for his dissident activities — emerged as the voice of the protest movement alongside Alexander Dubček, the symbol of 1968. On 29 November 1989, the Communist Party renounced its monopoly on power. On 29 December, the Federal Assembly unanimously elected Václav Havel as President of Czechoslovakia. The entire transition — from the first street demonstrations to the peaceful transfer of power — had taken 41 days. The playwright who had written about power without naming it had become the most powerful person in the country. The Velvet Revolution — so named for its non-violence — became the model for peaceful democratic transition.

On 1 January 1993, Czechoslovakia peacefully dissolved into two separate countries: the Czech Republic with Prague as its capital, and Slovakia with Bratislava as its capital. The “Velvet Divorce” was, like the revolution that preceded it, peaceful, negotiated and entirely characteristic of a country that had learned, across centuries of occupation, how to resist without unnecessary bloodshed.

Prague Since 1993 — The City Today

The Czech Republic entered the post-Communist era with significant advantages over many of its neighbours: a functioning democratic tradition to draw on from the First Republic, a relatively intact industrial base, a well-educated population and a capital city whose architectural heritage had survived both the Nazi occupation and Communist urban planning largely intact. The transition to a market economy was rapid and sometimes rough — the “voucher privatisation” of state enterprises in the early 1990s produced both new wealth and new inequality — but by the mid-1990s Prague was visibly transforming.

The city joined NATO in 1999 and the European Union in 2004, anchoring it firmly within Western institutions after half a century of forced separation. Tourism grew explosively through the 1990s and 2000s — Prague became one of the most visited cities in Europe, drawing 8–9 million tourists per year in peak years. The historic centre was listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, preserving it from the kind of commercial development that has damaged other Central European capitals.

The devastating floods of 2002 — the worst in 500 years — inundated much of Malá Strana, the riverside districts and the metro system, causing billions in damage and disrupting the city for months. The recovery demonstrated both the fragility of a city built around a major river and the resilience of its institutions. The Czech Republic has not yet adopted the Euro, retaining the Koruna as its currency — a source of ongoing political debate.

Today Prague is a genuinely European capital — politically engaged, culturally active, economically developed and attracting some of the finest new architecture alongside its medieval churches and Baroque palaces. The city that Jan Hus preached in, that Rudolf II filled with alchemists, that Soviet tanks rolled through in 1968 and that students faced down riot police in 1989 is also a city of excellent coffee, a world-class restaurant scene, vibrant contemporary art and one of the most architecturally extraordinary urban environments on the continent.

See Prague’s History For Yourself

History is better understood on foot than on a page. These guides take you directly to the places this article describes:

• Prague Castle Complete Visitor Guide — from Přemyslid foundations to Rudolf II’s Kunstkammer
• Jewish Quarter (Josefov) Complete Guide — six centuries of Jewish history and the Holocaust memorial
• Charles Bridge Guide — built 1357 on Charles IV’s order, still the spine of the city
• Petřín Tower & Funicular — the best overview of the medieval city’s silhouette
• 3 Days in Prague: Perfect Itinerary — how to see the most important historical sites in three days
• Kutná Hora Day Trip — the medieval silver mining city that funded Charles IV’s Prague
• Prague Districts Guide — which neighbourhood to base yourself in for exploring the historical city
• Prague Travel Guide 2025 — the complete practical guide to planning your visit

Frequently Asked Questions

This article contains affiliate links. If you book through them, HelloPrague earns a small commission at no extra cost to you. We only recommend services we genuinely believe will improve your Prague visit. Full disclosure