Prague is a city that dazzles tourists and exhausts historians. The spires and bridges may look timeless, but as Cynthia Paces reminds us, this beauty is a palimpsest of conquest, rebellion, and reinvention. Our conversation traced the city’s long history, from its beginnings as a fort on a hill (not for the view, but for survival), to its rebirth as a modern European capital after the fall of communism.
We began, naturally, at the beginning: the Slavic dukes who fortified the hilltop above the Vltava River and planted both a church and their ambitions there. Prague’s early centuries were messy — rival clans skirmished, trade routes shifted, and it wasn’t obvious this particular hill would become the “heart of Europe.” But slowly, and with the help of dynastic maneuvering, Prague established itself as more than just another fortified town.
“Prague does not let go; this little mother has claws.”
By the 14th century, Charles IV transformed the city into something grander. Educated in Paris, fluent in multiple languages, and very aware of his mixed Czech and Luxembourg lineage, Charles turned Prague into an international showpiece. French architects, Italian painters, and German stonemasons gave the city its Gothic grandeur. He even founded the “New Town,” complete with beer-brewing rights that made Bohemian burghers happy and thirsty. It was Prague’s golden age (or, perhaps, one of them), its moment at the very center of Europe.
Prague rarely stayed at the center for long, but for a while the reformer Jan Hus put the city back there a century later, drawing crowds to the Bethlehem Chapel with his fiery sermons on corruption and the vernacular. His execution in 1415 ignited the Hussite wars and left Prague both spiritually restless and politically combustible. And combustible is the right word — this is, after all, the city that resorted to defenestration as a form of political protest not once but twice.
Fast-forward: under the Habsburgs, Prague flourished culturally, if uneasily, and by the late 18th century Mozart was premiering Don Giovanni there, to an adoring public who seemed to appreciate him more than his Viennese neighbors did. In the 19th century, industrialization and nationalism gave Prague a new identity as a Czech city. Wenceslaus Square had once been the city’s horse market. Renamed after the Czech nation’s new patron saint, it became the stage for politics, revolutions, and eventually mass demonstrations.
The 20th century brought both glory and tragedy. Prague embodied the democratic promise of Czechoslovakia in 1918, only to endure occupation by Nazis, then domination by Communists. The brief Prague Spring of 1968 showed how deeply the city longed for “socialism with a human face,” until Warsaw Pact tanks rolled in. And yet, two decades later, Václav Havel and thousands of others filled Wenceslaus Square again, this time to topple the regime peacefully.
Today Prague is overrun by tourists and dotted with luxury shops — but it also carries monuments like The Return of the Stones, a reminder of lost Jewish cemeteries and broken histories. For Paces, that juxtaposition captures Prague perfectly: a city of beauty and tragedy, resilience and irony. As Kafka once wrote, “Prague does not let go; this little mother has claws.”
For Further Conversation
How did geography — a hill above a river — shape Prague’s destiny?
Was Wenceslas a Duke of the 900s, or a creation of the 19th century?
Why would Charles IV have been so interested in making Prague an “international city”? And why was he Charles IV so successful at doing it?
What does Jan Hus’s story reveal about the power of preaching and reform? About the power of the burghers of Prague?
How and why did defenestration become such a Czech political tradition?
Why did Mozart find such a receptive audience in Prague?
How did nationalism and industrialization reshape Prague in the 19th century? How does this compare to London, or Madrid? [For the latter, listen to our conversation with Luke Stegemann]
What lessons does the Prague Spring offer about hope, repression, and resilience?
How do monuments like The Return of the Stones keep memory alive in the present? What can other contemporary and future monuments learn from its example?
Bibliography
Cynthia Paces, Prague: The Heart of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025)
—Prague Panoramas: National Memory and Sacred Space in the Twentieth Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009)
Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Harvard University Press, 2007)
—, Prague: Belonging in the Modern City (Harvard University Press, 2021)
Derek Sayer, Prague, Capital of the Twentieth Century: A Surrealist History (Princeton University Press, 2013)
Mary Heimann, Czechoslovakia: The State That Failed (Yale University Press, 2011)
Paulina Bren, The Greengrocer and His TV: The Culture of Communism After the 1968 Prague Spring (Cornell University Press, 2010)
Eagle Glassheim, Noble Nationalists: The Transformation of the Bohemian Aristocracy (Harvard University Press, 2005)
Related Episodes