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Full of fairy-tale vistas, Prague is beautiful in a way that makes even the most jaded traveler stop and snap pictures. The city is physically divided in two by the Vltava River (also sometimes known by its German name, the Moldau), which runs from south to north with a single sharp turn to the east.
Originally, Prague was composed of five independent towns: Hrad?any (the Castle Area), Malá Strana (Lesser Quarter), Staré M?sto (Old Town), Nové M?sto (New Town), and Josefov (Jewish Quarter), and these areas still make up the heart of Prague—what you think of when picturing its famed winding cobblestone streets and squares.
Hrad?any, the seat of Czech royalty for hundreds of years, centers on the Pražský hrad (Prague Castle)—itself the site of the president's office. A cluster of white buildings yoked around the pointed steeples of a chapel, Prague Castle overlooks the city from a hilltop west of the Vltava River. Steps lead down from Hrad?any to the Lesser Quarter, an area dense with ornate mansions built for the 17th- and 18th-century nobility.
The looming Karl?v most (Charles Bridge) connects the Lesser Quarter with the Old Town. Old Town is hemmed in by the curving Vltava and three large commercial avenues: Revolu?ní to the east, Na p?íkop? to the southeast, and Národní t?ída to the south. A few blocks east of the bridge is the district's focal point: Starom?stské nám?stí (Old Town Square), a former medieval marketplace laced with pastel-color baroque houses—easily one of the most beautiful central squares in Europe. To the north of Old Town Square the diminutive Jewish Quarter fans out around a tony avenue called Pa?ížská.
Beyond the former walls of the Old Town, the New Town fills in the south and east. The name "new" is a misnomer—New Town was laid out in the 14th century. (It's new only when compared with the neighboring Old Town.) Today this mostly commercial district includes the city's largest squares, Karlovo nám?stí (Charles Square) and Václavské nám?stí (Wenceslas Square).
Roughly 1 km (½ mile) south of Karlovo nám?stí, along the Vltava, stands what’s left of the ancient castle of Vyšehrad high above the river. On a promontory to the east of Václavské nám?stí stretches Vinohrady, the home of Prague's well-to-do professional set. Bordering Vinohrady are the scruffier neighborhoods of Žižkov to the north and Nusle to the south. On the west bank of the Vltava lie many older residential neighborhoods and several parks. About 3 km (2 miles) from the center in every direction, communist-era housing projects, called paneláks, begin their unsightly sprawl.
This baroque synagogue, right by the entrance to the Old Jewish Cemetery, displays objects from Czech Jewish traditions, with an emphasis on celebrations and daily life. The synagogue was built at the end of the 17th century in place of three small buildings (a synagogue, a school, and a ritual bath) that were destroyed in a fire that devastated the ghetto in 1689. In the more recent
The history of Czech Jews from the 10th to the 18th century is illustrated, accompanied by some of the Prague Jewish Museum's most precious objects. The collection includes silver Torah shields and pointers, spice boxes, and candelabras; historic tombstones; and fine ceremonial textiles—some donated by Mordechai Maisel to the very synagogue he founded. The glitziest items come from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a prosperous era for Prague's Jews.
Here you'll find two moving testimonies to the appalling crimes perpetrated against the Jews during World War II. One astounds by sheer numbers: the walls are covered with nearly 80,000 names of Bohemian and Moravian Jews murdered by the Nazis. Among them are the names of the paternal grandparents of former U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright. The second is an exhibition of drawings made by children at the Nazi concentration camp Terezín, north of Prague. The Nazis used the camp for propaganda purposes to demonstrate their "humanity" toward Jews, and for a time the prisoners were given relative freedom to lead "normal" lives. However, transports to death camps in Poland began in earnest in 1944, and many thousands of Terezín prisoners, including most of these children, eventually perished. The entrance to the Old Jewish Cemetery is through this synagogue.
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