Golden Lane

Golden Lane's guide centers on a 1942 confrontation in one of Prague castle's tiny sixteenth-century cottages, when the fortune-teller Matylda Průšová, known as Madame de Thebes, told a Nazi officer to his face that the Third Reich was finished. It reaches back to the guards these cramped houses were built for under Emperor Rudolf II, and forward to novelist Franz Kafka, who borrowed a room here to write in 1916. Look at the low doorways and tiny windows as you walk the lane.