The St. Vitus Cathedral is the most visible and iconic structure in western Prague. At 337 feet tall and 407 feet long, it's the most prominent structure within the confines of Prague Castle, which is the largest ancient castle complex in the world, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. There will be more on the castle in the next page, but for now you can just think of it as an enclosed collection of buildings on top of a hill overlooking the Vltava River from the west.

The present-day cathedral is the third church devoted to St. Vitus that has been built at its location. Vitus was a Sicilian Christian who was martyred as a teen-ager in the year 303. You may have heard of an affliction known as St. Vitus' Dance, whose official name is Sydenham's chorea. The affliction sometimes occurs in rheumatic fever patients, and is characterized by rapid, uncontrolled jerking movements of the face, hands and feet. St. Vitus is not known to have been much of a dancer, but apparently someone saw a connection between the condition's movements and those of dancing celebrants of the feast of St. Vitus. In any case, St. Vitus is now the patron saint of actors, comedians, dancers and epileptics, and has an illness named after him.

Vitus may have been one of the more obscure saints at one time, but his popularity in Prague increased greatly in the year 925, when King Henry I of Germany presented bones from the saint's hand as a gift to the Duke of Bohemia, Wenceslas I. From the Prague introductory page, you might remember Wenceslas as the "Good King Wenceslas" from the Christmas carol. You might also remember that he ended up assassinated by his brother in 935, and eventually became a saint in his own right. But before all that, he built the first St. Vitus church in Prague Castle, a relatively small Romanesque building for celebration of the saint and a home for his hand bones. And though Wenceslas didn't know it, he would end up buried there also.

The small church soon proved to be too small for those wishing to attend services, and in 1060, using as pretext the elevation of Prague to a bishopric, construction was begun on a much larger church, which would become a Romanesque basilica. This was fine until 1344, when Prague was elevated again, this time to an archbishopric. The Bohemian king at the time, known as John the Blind, laid a foundation stone for a new cathedral, but was not able to oversee much construction work, as he died in 1346. He was succeeded by his son, Charles IV, who would also become Holy Roman Emperor. Charles had ambitious plans for the new cathedral (as well as for Prague in general), and hired designers and builders who would construct the cathedral in the French Gothic style.

Construction proceeded slowly because of competing projects, and work pretty much stopped in the first part of the 15th Century, when the Hussite Wars started. The cathedral was about half built at this point, and work over the next few centuries consisted mainly of repairs (there was a fire in 1541) and occasional addition of decorative elements. Finally, in the 19th Century, funds and determination became available, and work was resumed, with late 19th and early 20th Century styles being applied to the church. By this time one of the styles in vogue was neo-Gothic, which went fairly well with the old style, which was Gothic Gothic. Two neo-Gothic towers were added at the end of the newly completed nave (there were some complaints that the towers altered the skyline everyone was used to, but the complainers eventually gave up or died), and construction was declared to be complete in 1929, 585 years after it began. Here's a picture of how the footprint of the new cathedral (in blue) compares with those of the previous St. Vitus churches:

With the castle being on top of a hill, getting to it from the St. Nicholas Church involved a bit of a climb. We'd have taken a funicular or an escalator if either was in evidence, but neither conveyance appeared to exist. A sign pointed the way between some buildings, and that's where we found stairs. Rather a lot of them.

At the top we found a large square, called Hradčany Square (Hradčanské Náměstí – a náměstí is a square, and hrad means "castle"). There are some buildings of note on this square. One is the Archbishop's Palace, which has been the seat of the Catholic Church in Prague since 1562 (it underwent a Baroque rebuild in the 18th Century). Another is the Schwarzenberg Palace, built in the 16th Century in Renaissance style. This palace is now owned by the National Gallery in Prague, and is used for exhibition of its collection of works by old masters.


The structure of most interest to us on Hradčany Square, though, was the entrance gate to Prague Castle (Pražský Hrad), known as the Giants' Gate. The name comes from the statues of wrestling Titans (1902 copies of 1770 originals) to be found at the gate. Also impressive (smaller but potentially more lethal) are the two armed soldiers which guard the entrance. There is an hourly changing of the guard ceremony (we came a little too late for one of them), including one at noon with a cast of thousands. Or dozens, anyway.


Beyond the gate is a large but empty courtyard, surrounded by buildings which are used by the government. An archway through one of the buildings leads to another courtyard with a fountain from 1686. The ticket office is in this courtyard.

Another archway leads from this courtyard into the interesting part of the castle. Your interest is immediately demanded by the St. Vitus Cathedral, whose two 269-foot neo-Gothic towers await just beyond the archway. The entrance and exit doors are found at the foot of these towers, but to get in, you need to join the queue, found along the left side of the church.

On entering, you find a church that's very big and very Gothic (and very crowded, at least during our visit). The church has all of the elements required for a cathedral, but many are done in unique ways. The older elements, which incorporate sculptural concepts, are mainly the work of Peter Parler, who became master builder in 1352 at the age of 23, and of his sons Wenzel and Johannes.




The cathedral is also full of interesting stained-glass windows. Most are 20th Century and most are found above chapels.




One window of particular note was designed for the New Archbishop Chapel by the popular Czech artist Alphons Mucha around 1930. Mucha was best known for work he'd done in Paris, early in his career, as a creator of art nouveau lithographs, mostly done as advertising. After making his fortune in Paris, Mucha returned to his homeland and devoted his artistic attention toward celebration of the Slavic peoples, eventually producing a monumental series of paintings known as The Slav Epic. There will be a future page about this series, and we'll talk more about Mucha at that time. For now, here's Mucha's window in the St. Vitus Cathedral. It isn't technically stained glass, but instead a painting done on glass. The style might look familiar to you.

There are artworks scattered throughout the cathedral, some with no obvious connection to a particular chapel. For instance:

And of course, there are many chapels as well. Here are a few of those:



There is also a tomb for St. Vitus, or part of him – presumably the tomb holds the hand bones (some sources say arm bones) that inspired Wenceslas I to devote a church to him.

Some tombs are showier than others. Here's a Baroque tomb, devoted to Leopold Anton Joseph Schlik, who was Bohemian Chancellor and a Field Marshal during the War of the Spanish Succession, early in the 18th Century.

The most spectacular tomb in the main cathedral area would have to be that of St. John Nepomuk, who died in Prague in 1393. While it seems clear that he was murdered according to orders from King Wenceslas IV, two reasons for the execution are typically given. One is that John served as the confessor of the king's wife, and he refused to divulge information that he had received in the confessional to her husband. The other reason has to do with papal politics. This was the time of the "split" papacy, with one Pope in Rome and a second Pope in Avignon, France. John apparently sided with his archbishop in supporting the Roman pope, while Wenceslas supported the Avignon papacy. Whether either of these stories (or both) is the main reason behind John's death seems to be unclear, but there's general agreement that John was tortured and then thrown into the Vltava River from the Charles Bridge, where he drowned. John is now encased in a fabulously Baroque 1736 tomb (by an artist named Fischer von Erlach) which incorporates a prodigious amount of silver (two tons is the amount that is typically quoted).


Wenceslas IV, by the way, is also entombed in the St. Vitus Cathedral, in a relatively sedate tomb in the royal crypt. We weren't able to view the crypt, but a fair representation of Bohemian royalty can be found there, including Charles IV, who has a central place of honor.

Wenceslas I, however, is not found in the royal crypt. He has a special burial place, under a special chapel that is not usually accessible to the public. This chapel has remained in the same place since shortly after Wenceslas died, through the centuries as radical changes were made to the church surrounding it. There are two doors into the St. Wenceslas Chapel, and sometimes one or the other is open for viewing purposes only, but both doors were closed during our visit. But during a previous visit in 2007, we had visited the cathedral when the western door to the chapel happened to be open. As you can see, the wall decorations are copious, and apparently include precious stones.


Somewhere in the chapel there is a locked doorway to a passage which leads to the place where the Czech crown jewels are kept. The jewels are always kept in this place, except for one day every eight years, when they are brought out to be viewed by the public.

But we weren't going to be hanging around that long, as the time had come for us to leave the cathedral. We exited through a door in the west end of the church, across from the door we'd entered through, and walked around to a courtyard on the south side of the church, from which we could get a good look at it. The most prominent feature of the church from this side was its 337-foot bell tower. The tower was half its present height when the long pause in construction began. Sporadic attempts at resuming the construction were mostly unsuccessful, but one of the few things that were eventually accomplished was completion of the bell tower, which has an 18th Century spire that is stylistically Baroque.


There are many interesting details on the church's exterior. There is a door on the south side, usually locked, which enters between the bell tower and the St. Wenceslas Chapel. Before the western end of the cathedral was finished, this was the main entrance. Above the doorway is a mosaic of The Last Judgment, which dates back to about 1370.



We made our way around to the east end of the cathedral, on our way to visiting the rest of the castle. On this side there is yet another courtyard, and in the courtyard there was a vendor selling what looked like hot dogs (some kind of sausage on some kind of bread), and it occurred to us that we were pretty hungry. We pulled out some korunas, bought hot dogs, and dined on them al fresco.

The hot dogs were quite good and the interlude quite welcome, but it soon occurred to us that the rest of the world's largest castle was waiting for us. We got up, tossed our refuse into the appropriate containers, and resumed our exploration of the castle.