Of all the wars Prague was an active participant in, few leave their mark on the city today. One exception is on the church of Charlemagne in Prague’s New Town – the Siege of Prague from 1757.
Emperor Charles IV built the Church of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary and Charlemagne, to give the church its full name. He was the one who decided Prague’s Old Town was, well, old.
He decided to create a New Town for Prague surrounding the old one and tore down the Old Town walls to create a single larger city. This was in 1351.
Today, the New Town is as congested as the Old Town was in Charles IV’s day. I took a tram to that part of the city and walked along a congested boulevard hurtling people southwards and out of Prague. The view today shows the Nusle valley to the south-west. Skyscrapers pepper the skyline, with the Corinthia Towers right in front of the church. The Emperor must have stood here in those days, on the boundary of his New Town, and decided this would be a peaceful place for a church1.
The Emperor had been coronated in Aachen, where the great Charlemagne’s funerary chapel is1. His parents named him after Charlemagne1, so when he decided to build a church, his thoughts turned to that great European himself. The two churches have similar architectural characteristics. One key difference is that the Prague church has the longest Gothic nave in central Europe. It is 22.8 metres wide.
The church is in the grounds of the Czech Police Museum, which is an odd location for a church. The traffic is nothing more than a distant hum from the small green churchyard. The building is hidden from the road, but is just as impressive as it was in the Emperor’s day.
During the Seven Years War, Prussian Frederick II entered Bohemia in their fight against Austria. In 1757, the Prussian laid siege to Prague from across the Nusle valley. One of the main buildings in their sights was this church1.
Today, the cannonballs that hit the building are still embedded in the facade as a reminder of that war.
My article about the church of Our Lady of the Angels in Prague’s castle district describes cannonballs in its facade from the same war.
If you use these two locations as reference points, you can see how close the Prussians were to taking Prague. From these two churches, it is no more than a 30 minute brisk walk to the Charles Bridge. A little longer, or a little stronger, and Prague would have become Prussian in the eighteenth century.
Do you know of evidence of past wars on churches? Leave a comment and let us know.
- History of the Church; KostalnaKarlove.com; 2018-03-30; (Article in Czech) [↩][↩][↩][↩]