Old Town Square

Where it sits. Staroměstské náměstí is the irregular open heart of Prague's Old Town, roughly nine thousand square metres of paving between Wenceslas Square to the southeast and Charles Bridge to the west, with the lanes of Celetná, Dlouhá, Pařížská and Karlova feeding into it from every side. Nothing about it is rectilinear: the square grew out of an eleventh-century marketplace at the meeting of trade routes, and the frontages still follow the old plot lines, which is why the towers of the Church of Our Lady before Týn appear to lean into the sky at a slightly different angle from every viewpoint. Those twin Gothic towers rise 80 metres and are set behind a screen of houses, so the church reveals itself in slices rather than all at once.

The story behind it. The square has been the stage for most of the decisive moments in Czech history. Jan Hus, whose statue by Ladislav Šaloun was unveiled at the centre on 6 July 1915 for the 500th anniversary of his burning at Konstanz, gave the Czech Reformation its name and its martyr. In front of the Old Town Hall, 27 crosses set into the pavement mark the execution on 21 June 1621 of leaders of the anti-Habsburg revolt after the Battle of White Mountain; local custom is to step around them rather than on them. The Baroque Marian column, raised after the Thirty Years' War, was pulled down on 3 November 1918 as a symbol of Habsburg rule and re-erected, after decades of argument, in 2020. The northern wing of the Old Town Hall was burned in the last days of the Second World War and never rebuilt, which explains the odd lawn on that side.

On screen. The square is the second of Prague's two great location clichés, and it earned the status honestly. Mission: Impossible (1996) used it along with Charles Bridge and the National Museum during the 1995 shoot that made Prague a mainstream production city. Miloš Forman had dressed these streets as Vienna for Amadeus (1984) a decade earlier, shooting in Prague for seven months because the city's eighteenth-century fabric had survived where Vienna's had not — one of the most consequential substitutions in film history, and one many viewers still get backwards. Since then the square has stood in for imperial Vienna, wartime Berlin and generic Mitteleuropa in dozens of productions, helped by the fact that the whole space can be cleared of cars and modern signage in a morning.

What you actually see today. The set piece is the astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall's south wall, first installed in 1410 and the oldest such clock still running anywhere. On the hour, from 9am to 11pm, the Apostles process past two small windows while a skeleton tolls a bell, a performance that lasts about forty-five seconds and reliably disappoints anyone expecting more — the real marvel is the mechanism and the calendar dial by Josef Mánes below it. Climb the hall's tower (there is a lift) for the view that shows how the square actually works: Týn's spires, the green dome of the Baroque St Nicholas Church, the Kinský Palace with its rococo facade housing a National Gallery collection, and the red rooftops running west to the river. Inside Týn, reached through an arcade beside house number 604, is the tomb slab of Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who died in Prague in 1601 while serving Emperor Rudolf II. Two other frontages repay a second look: the Gothic House at the Stone Bell, stripped back in the 1970s from a Baroque skin to its fourteenth-century stone facade, and the Storch House, covered in 1897 with a sgraffito St Wenceslas on horseback. Franz Kafka was born a minute away, at the corner of Maiselova and U Radnice, in July 1883, and spent much of his life within a few hundred metres of this paving.

Getting there and timing. Metro line A to Staroměstská, then two minutes on foot; the square itself is flat, fully paved and step-free, though the cobbles are rough for small wheels. Sit-down cafés on the square charge a heavy premium for the address, and horse-carriage and currency-exchange touts work the perimeter — the exchange booths in particular are best ignored in favour of a bank ATM. Early morning, before the walking tours assemble at the clock, is the only reliably calm window. From late November to early January the square fills with the country's largest Christmas market, with a tall decorated tree, a stage and food stalls; that period is also when hotel rates in the surrounding streets peak. Easter brings a smaller version of the same.