
Prague Castle
Vast hilltop fortress complex with a Gothic cathedral, royal palace, and presidential seat.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Prague Castle traces the morning of May 23, 1618, when Protestant Bohemian nobles put two Catholic governors and their secretary on trial in the castle's chancellery and threw them from a window twenty-one meters above the courtyard. It follows the argument that split the city afterward, over what exactly broke their fall, and introduces the secretary who walked away with an unlikely noble title. Stand in the courtyard below and look up at the window that started that argument.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Old Royal Palace
Gothic-Renaissance hall where knights once jousted and a 1618 window fall sparked a European war.
Mihulka Powder Tower
Round artillery tower turned alchemists' laboratory, where an emperor chased gold from lead.
Golden Lane
Row of tiny sixteenth-century cottages built into a castle fortification wall, once home to guards, a fortune-teller and a novelist.
Charles Square
Vast former cattle market turned park, site of a violent medieval window-throwing uprising.
St. Vitus Cathedral
Gothic cathedral of soaring spires holding a cursed crown behind a door with seven locks.
Old Town Bridge Tower
Gothic gate tower on a medieval bridge, once hung with severed heads as a warning to rebels.