St Vitus Cathedral, Prague

A cathedral that took 585 years to finish, sitting inside a castle, holding the Czech crown jewels behind a door with seven locks. Most people walk in, look up, and walk out in fifteen minutes. This is what to look at instead, in the order you meet it.

Six centuries, and a wall across the middle

Charles IV laid the first stone on 21 November 1344, the same year Prague was raised to an archbishopric, and the two things were the same project: he wanted a coronation church for Bohemian kings, a reliquary for his saints, and a cathedral to match the new rank of his city. He hired the best man available. Matthias of Arras came from the papal court at Avignon, brought a French cathedral plan with him, and got as far as the lower choir before he died in 1352.

His replacement was twenty-three years old. Peter Parler came from a family of masons in Schwäbisch Gmünd, and rather than finish someone else's drawing he changed it. The choir vault he built over the high altar is a net of criss-crossing ribs that ignores the bay divisions underneath, one of the earliest of its kind anywhere, and the ancestor of every English fan vault that came later. He also put a gallery of portrait busts in the triforium, and put his own face in it.

Then it stopped. Charles died in 1378, his son Wenceslas IV had other troubles, and the Hussite wars from 1419 put an end to cathedral building in Bohemia for a very long time. A fire in 1541 took the roofs. For nearly four hundred years St Vitus was a Gothic choir with a temporary wall across the west end and nothing behind it — the coronation church of a kingdom, half-built, weatherproofed and left.

What finally finished it was nineteenth-century nationalism. The Union for the Completion of the Cathedral was founded in 1859, work restarted in 1873 under Josef Mocker, and the building was consecrated on 28 September 1929 — the millennium of St Wenceslas's death, and 585 years after that first stone.

All of which gives you the single most useful fact for a visit: the building gets older the further east you go. The twin west spires everyone photographs from the third courtyard are Neo-Gothic. The nave is Neo-Gothic. The transepts are the join. The choir, the ambulatory chapels and the Golden Gate are Parler's, and they are the real thing.

The visitor's cheat sheet

What to see, in the order you meet it

Outside: the south side and the Golden Gate

Almost everybody arrives in the third courtyard, turns to face the west front, and never walks round. Do walk round. The south side is where the medieval cathedral actually addressed the castle, and it holds two things the west front does not.

The first is the Golden Gate: a triple-arched porch that was the ceremonial entrance, the door kings came through on coronation day. Above it is a mosaic of the Last Judgement, made in 1370–71 from something over 40,000 glass cubes by craftsmen working in the Venetian manner — Christ in glory in the centre, Charles IV and his fourth wife Elizabeth of Pomerania kneeling below, the saved rising on one side and the damned going the other way. It is one of the very few monumental exterior mosaics to survive north of the Alps from that century, and it very nearly did not: the glass decayed badly, and the whole thing was conserved over more than a decade in a joint project with the Getty Conservation Institute, finished in 2000.

The second is the Great South Tower above it, which stops abruptly at 96.5 metres and wears a Renaissance onion cap instead of a Gothic spire, because the money ran out and the fashion changed while everyone waited. The stub is the honest face of the building's history.

The free bit: the west end of the nave

Inside the west door there is a barrier, and the space behind it costs nothing. Stand there for a couple of minutes before you commit. You get the full length of the building, 124 metres of it, the west rose window at your back and the apse glass at the far end, and it tells you honestly whether you want to pay for the rest. Some people are satisfied here. Most are not.

The west rose above you is by František Kysela, 1927, and shows the Creation in about 27,000 pieces of glass. It is worth turning round for.

The Mucha window

Third chapel along the north aisle — the new archbishop's chapel — and it is the thing most visitors remember. Alphonse Mucha designed it in 1931, and it is unlike every other window in the cathedral because it is painted rather than assembled: large sheets of glass, coloured and shaded with enamels, so the picture is not chopped up by lead lines. The effect is pale gold and blue-green rather than jewel-red, and it reads like a poster, which is fair enough, because Mucha made his name making posters.

The subject is Saints Cyril and Methodius bringing Christianity to the Slavs, with St Ludmila and the boy Wenceslas in the middle. It was paid for by the Banka Slavie insurance company, and the bank's name is still lettered along the bottom — sponsorship in a cathedral window, ninety years before anyone called it that.

The other twentieth-century windows are worth a look on the way past. Max Švabinský's Last Judgement fills the south transept, and Kysela did much of the rest. The glass at St Vitus is overwhelmingly modern, and unusually good.

The Chapel of St Wenceslas

Off the south transept, and you look in from the doorway. Nobody goes further; the chapel is closed to visitors and always has been in living memory. Look anyway, and look for longer than feels natural.

It stands on the site of the rotunda where Wenceslas — the tenth-century duke, murdered by his brother's men in 935, later Bohemia's patron saint and, at several removes, the Good King Wenceslas of the carol — was buried. Parler built the chapel around the grave in 1362–67. The lower walls are faced with something over 1,300 polished slabs of Bohemian jasper and amethyst set in gilded plaster, so the room glitters like the inside of a reliquary, which is what it is. Above them runs a Passion cycle of about 1372, and above that a Legend of St Wenceslas painted around 1509 by the Master of the Litoměřice Altarpiece.

In the south-west corner is a small door with a lion's-head handle. Behind it a staircase goes up to the Crown Chamber, where the Bohemian crown jewels are kept: St Wenceslas's crown, made for Charles IV in 1346, with the sceptre and orb. The door has seven locks. The seven keys are held by seven different office-holders — the president, the prime minister, the archbishop of Prague, the speakers of both chambers of parliament, the dean of the cathedral chapter and the mayor of Prague — and all seven have to be present together to open it. The regalia come out for public display roughly once a decade. You are not going to see them; the door is the point.

Parler's choir, and the busts nobody looks at

Past the transept the building changes, and you should be able to feel it. The choir is Parler's, begun in 1356, and the vault over it is the thing to stop under: instead of a rib pattern that repeats bay by bay, the ribs run diagonally across the bays in a continuous net, so the eye is pulled east rather than counted along. It was radical in the 1370s and it was copied for two centuries afterwards.

Then look up into the triforium — the shallow arcaded gallery running above the arches, below the windows. Set into it are twenty-one carved portrait busts, made in Parler's workshop between about 1374 and 1385. They are not saints. They are Charles IV and his four wives, his sons, the archbishops, the cathedral's directors of works, and the two architects: Matthias of Arras, and Peter Parler himself, in a hood, looking out over the choir he built.

These are among the earliest true portrait sculptures in medieval Europe — individual faces, not types — and a working mason putting his own likeness in a royal gallery was an extraordinary claim to make in the 1370s. They are also thirty feet up and unlit. Bring a zoom lens, or you will not see them at all.

The royal mausoleum

In the middle of the choir, behind a Renaissance iron grille, is a white marble tomb chest with three recumbent figures on the lid. It was carved by Alexander Colin of Mechelen and finished in 1589, and it commemorates Ferdinand I, his wife Anna Jagiellon, and their son Maximilian II. Around the sides are relief portraits of the other rulers buried below.

Below is the royal crypt, cut under the choir floor, and this is where the bodies actually are: Charles IV, four of his wives, Wenceslas IV, George of Poděbrady, Rudolf II, and the remains of the eleventh-century rotunda and basilica that stood here before the cathedral. The crypt is normally closed. When it does open — it has been included in some guided castle tours — it is the single best half-hour in the building, because the older walls are down there.

The tomb of St John of Nepomuk

In the ambulatory behind the high altar, on the north side, and you will hear the tour groups before you see it. A canopy of red velvet held up by flying silver angels, over a tomb chest carried on more silver angels, the whole thing designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and made in 1733–36 by Antonio Corradini and the Viennese silversmith Johann Joseph Würth. The usual figure quoted is around two tonnes of silver.

John of Nepomuk was vicar-general to the archbishop of Prague, and in 1393 he was tortured on the orders of Wenceslas IV and thrown off the Charles Bridge into the Vltava. The reason was a brutal little dispute about the appointment of an abbot. The reason the story tells is better: that he was the queen's confessor and refused to break the seal of confession, which made him the patron saint of confessors and of the drowned, and gave every bridge in central Europe a statue.

Look for the cherub on the near side holding a tongue on a cushion. When the grave was opened in 1719 the investigators found a soft reddish mass in the skull, took it for an incorrupt tongue, and it became the central relic of the canonisation in 1729. A scientific examination in the 1970s identified it as brain tissue. The tongue stayed in the sculpture, because by then it had been there for two and a half centuries.

The ambulatory chapels and St Adalbert

Keep going round. The ring of chapels behind the choir is Parler's, and the Wallenstein, Saxon and Martinic chapels hold late-Gothic and Renaissance tombs that most visitors walk past at speed. The Chapel of the Holy Rood, off the south side, has the entrance to the crypt.

In the ambulatory there is also a set of carved wooden panels from 1630 showing the flight of the Winter King, Frederick of the Palatinate, from Prague after the Battle of White Mountain, with the city drawn in enough detail that you can pick out individual buildings. It is a seventeenth-century news photograph in oak and it is almost always empty of people.

The Great South Tower

287 steps, bought separately, and the spiral is tight enough that traffic goes one way at a time and there is no lift and no shortcut. Two-thirds of the way up you pass the bell chamber and Zikmund, cast in 1549 by Tomáš Jaroš, about two and a half metres across and the largest bell in the Czech lands. It is still rung by hand, by a team hauling on the headstock, on major feasts and at moments of national significance — and there is a national superstition that when something happens to Zikmund, something happens to the country. The clapper broke on 15 June 2002; the floods came two months later. Czechs will tell you this without prompting.

Above the bells the stair passes the Renaissance clock — two faces, the upper for hours and the lower for quarters, which catches people out — and comes out on a gallery with the best view in Prague: the whole castle laid out below, the red roofs of Malá Strana, the river and its bridges, and the Old Town beyond.

Tickets and tours

Don't miss

• The Mucha window Third chapel on the left up the north aisle. Painted glass, not leaded, in pale golds and blue-greens, with the insurance company that paid for it still lettered along the bottom.
• The door with seven locks In the corner of the Chapel of St Wenceslas. Seven keys, seven office-holders, all of whom have to turn up together. The crown jewels are up the stairs behind it.
• Parler's self-portrait Twenty-one portrait busts in the triforium above the choir, including both architects. Among the earliest true portrait sculpture in Europe, and thirty feet up in the dark.
• The tongue that was not a tongue On Nepomuk's silver tomb in the ambulatory, a cherub holds a tongue on a cushion. It was identified as brain tissue in the 1970s. The cherub kept holding it.
• The Golden Gate mosaic Outside, on the south side. A Last Judgement in over 40,000 glass cubes, 1371, restored with the Getty. The one thing here nobody photographs, because everyone is facing the spires.
• Zikmund The 1549 bell, two-thirds of the way up the Great South Tower, still swung by hand. Ask a Czech what happened in 2002.

Insider tips

The changing of the guard at the main gate is on the hour, with the full ceremony and band at noon. It is genuinely good and it is free, but it also means the courtyards are solid with people from about 11.40. Either watch it or avoid it; don't try to do both.

The cathedral is at its best in low sun. Mid-afternoon in winter, the south windows throw colour right across the nave floor. In midsummer that happens too early in the morning for most visitors to see it.

Sunday mornings the cathedral closes to visitors for Mass, opening to sightseers at noon. You can attend the service, and the choir is very good, but you will not be wandering about with a camera.

The castle circuit ticket is valid for two consecutive days. Almost nobody uses that. If you are in Prague for more than a night, do the cathedral properly on the first afternoon and come back for the Old Royal Palace and Golden Lane the next morning, when both are empty.

If the tower queue looks long, walk out to the Old Castle Steps instead. The view is nearly as good, it costs nothing, and there is a beer garden halfway down.

Where to stay and eat nearby

Hradčany, the castle district, is quiet after dark and expensive during the day. It suits people who want to be first through the gate in the morning. Malá Strana, down the hill, is prettier, has the restaurants, and is still a ten-minute walk from the castle.

For food, avoid everything on the first two streets below the castle — it is priced for people who will never come back. Walk five minutes further into Malá Strana and prices halve.

Nearby churches

• St Nicholas Church, Malá Strana — ten minutes downhill, and the best Baroque interior in the city
• Church of Our Lady before Týn — across the river on Old Town Square, with Tycho Brahe's tomb
• Sedlec Ossuary — an hour by train, and completely unlike anything here

See all the churches worth visiting in Prague →