Old Town Square

You are in the heart of the Old Town, a square of more than 9,000 square metres that has been a marketplace since the Middle Ages. But far more than the price of grain has been decided here.

1The morning of 21 June 1621

Look at the ground in front of the Town Hall tower: you will see 27 white crosses set into the cobbles. They mark the site of the scaffold where, that day, 27 leaders of the Czech estates' rebellion against the Habsburgs were executed: three lords, seven knights and seventeen burghers. Coming a year after the defeat at White Mountain, the execution opened more than two centuries of Habsburg rule and forced re-Catholicisation.

2Jan Hus, standing before everyone

The huge central monument, by Ladislav Šaloun, was unveiled in 1915, five hundred years after the reformer Jan Hus was burned at the stake. Three years later, on 3 November 1918, with Czechoslovakia just born, a crowd pulled down the Baroque Marian column of 1650, seen as a Habsburg symbol. A replica returned to the square in 2020.

31945 and 1948

In May 1945, during the Prague Uprising, the neo-Gothic wing of the Town Hall burned under German fire; today the gap is a small garden. And on 21 February 1948, from the balcony of the Kinský Palace, communist leader Klement Gottwald addressed the crowd during the coup that brought his party to power.

4What to look for

• The 27 crosses in the paving at the foot of the Town Hall tower.
• The Kinský Palace, pink and white Rococo on the east side, with its balcony.
• The inscription on the Hus monument, with its motto about truth.