Oldright.com Political Blogs

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

I want to talk about Old Prague this city of a hundred towers is like going through a collection of antiquities, in which the spectator finds himself at every step in communion with another age. Of the various designations which have been employed to give expression to the beauties of this ancient city none is more apt than that which I have just used–” die hunderttürmige-Stadt”– the city of a hundred towers. For let anyone take up a position where he can obtain a bird’s-eye view of it, he will not fail to find a vast amount of pleasure in contemplating the multitudinous towers within the range of his vision –towers of all sorts of shapes and sizes, rising high above the tops of surrounding houses. The art of eight centuries has imparted to them a quite delightful charm. Time and weather-worn remains of ruined battlements lie on the rocky slopes of the Vysehrad, whose uncomely walls represent all that remains of structures that arose more than nine hundred years ago. While the city at large possesses more or less numerous and interesting survivals of the great past, it is to two of its divisions that one more particularly looks for features especially attractive to the artist–the so-called “Klein-seite” or Little Prague, with its great and proud associations, and the “Altstadt” or Old Town, whose close proximity to the Jewish quarter testifies to the congested state of the population in this part. It was during the reign of the Emperor Charles IV., in the fourteenth century, that the capital of Bohemia reached its greatest glory–its golden age as regards art.