Our last day in Prague started out on a bluebird day—60˚ and sunny, reaching around 70˚. We decided to visit a few sites that we had discovered on our other adventures, and also to pay a planned visit to the Museum of Communism.

Prague is divided into four quarters—The Castle Quarter (where we’re staying) and the Lesser Quarter on the West Bank of the Vltava River, and Old Town and New Town on the east side of the river. The Jewish Quarter is part of Old Town, and that’s where this afternoon’s adventure took us. The history of the Jewish people in Bohemia/Czechoslovakia is not substantially different from other European cities—isolation, persecution on the one hand, and significant cultural and social contributions on the other.

This morning started with a trip through Old Town to New Town, or at least the edge of it, to visit the Alphons Mucha Museum. You may not know the name, but it’s likely you are at least passingly familiar with his work. Mucha is one of the founders of the Art Nouveau movement, and along with Aubrey Beardsley and Toulouse Lautrec, its most famous practitioner. Mucha was a native Czech, but his most famous works were the music hall and concert posters created when he lived in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. His style was hugely influential, even to modern graphic artists like Peter Max—striking figures, heavy outlines, flowers and natural elements, idyllic settings.

The Prague Castle isn’t just one building, and not everything there is accessible to visitors. The castle’s former royal residences are now home to the Czech president and a number of government offices and functionaries. Basically, visitors are funneled through four main attractions—The Basilica of St. Vitus, the Vladislav Hall, the Basilica of St, George, and the Golden Lane. More on each later.

St. Nicholas is a beautiful but somewhat unremarkable late Gothic and early Baroque building that was largely closed when we visited due to some services being prepared. Of note though—during World War II, it housed Radio Prague as the main radio stations were under constant attack from Germany.

The first church we visited in Prague was St. Francis of Asissi. That’s largely because it lies at the far end of the Charles Bridge from our hotel and is the first thing you see when you cross the river. The inside is glorious—another beautiful Baroque space with superb acoustics that houses the second oldest organ in Prague (1702) played by Bach himself. Like its close neighbor St. Salvatore, it is host to nightly concerts of Baroque music. We hope to catch some as soon as we catch our breath.

St. Salvatore was build on the foundation of what was the Gothic church of St. Klements. In the late 1500s, the Jesuits started building on that foundation. Its current state took several hundred years to complete, the large dome being the last addition. It’s a tribute to the Baroque style of architecture.

One of the most well-known images of Prague—certainly if you judge by the number of shops selling cheap replicas of it—is the astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall building. The building was constructed in the 1300s and the clock was added in the early 1400s. The second dial is a much later addition, appearing in the 1900s. The clock was mostly destroyed in World Was II, so much of what you see now is a reconstruction.

The Astronomical Tower (not to be confused with the Astronomical Clock—more on that in a different post) and the Klementinium Library were begun at different times in the 1600s by the Jesuits who wanted to found a new university. The complex of buildings are generally referred to as the Klementinium, the library and the tower being the most accessible, if you count the library as being accessible. It was, and still is, an important astronomical center. Detailed daily weather and astronomical measurements have been taken from the same spot since 1775, some by Tycho Brahe himself.

If there were a centerpiece to Prague, it would probably be the medieval Charles Bridge, also sometimes called the Stone Bridge. It was the first bridge across Vltava River—or at least it was built upon the first bridge. It was the only way to cross the river until 1841. The Charles was commissioned in 1342 and is about the length of seven football fields. The bridge’s side rails are home to a dozen or so statues depicting various saints. It used to carry traffic, but now is a pedestrian bridge.