Vyšehrad, Prague

There is a rock above the Vltava where Czech legend says a princess prophesied the glory of Prague. There is almost no evidence any of it happened here. What is certainly true is stranger: that in the nineteenth century a Catholic chapter and a patriotic society, working side by side on the same acre, decided to make this the cradle of the nation — and built a painted basilica, a national cemetery and a communal tomb of the great to prove it. You can walk the whole argument in an afternoon.

What it costs now, which is not what your guidebook says

For years the honest advice about Vyšehrad was that the grounds were free and only the church charged. That is no longer true. The park, the ramparts and the cemetery are still free and still magnificent, but the monument administration now runs a full ticketed, timed, guided-tour operation underground: the casemates and Gorlice at 330 Kč, the Martin casemates at 220, the Podolí casemates at 270, a new archaeological route called Royal Vyšehrad at 330, and the history exhibition at 190. The basilica, at 180 Kč, is run by a different body altogether — the Royal Collegiate Chapter — and is only one of eight paid things on the hill.

Two pieces of good news buried in the small print. The basilica is free for families with children at weekends, and for anyone over 65 on a weekday from 3pm. And there is still a free audio app with four routes, which covers the outdoor half of the site perfectly well.

A thousand years in six moves

Settlement goes back to about 3800 BC, and a princely stronghold to the second half of the tenth century. The decisive date is 1070, when Vratislav II fell out with his brother, who happened to be bishop of Prague, moved his seat here from the Castle, and founded a collegiate chapter exempt from the bishop and answering directly to the pope — for twelve marks of silver a year. It was endowed with sixty-six villages, on a scale comparable to the bishopric itself. In 1086 Vratislav was crowned the first king of Bohemia.

Vyšehrad’s second peak is Charles IV, who between 1348 and 1350 rebuilt the fortifications with some fifteen square towers and two great gates, tied the hill into the walls of his new New Town, and wrote the coronation order so that the ceremonies for a king of Bohemia began here, on the eve, where the new ruler was shown the bast shoes and satchel of Přemysl the Ploughman. By then the Gothic basilica was 110 metres long and the largest church in Prague.

Then 1420. The Hussites besieged the place, beat the relieving crusade on the Pankrác plain on 1 November, took the surrender and left it in ruins. The Přemyslid tomb was destroyed and the royal bones scattered across the churchyard.

In 1653 Ferdinand III approved a Baroque fortress here, and the upper town was demolished outright to clear the ground. Over two million gulden had gone into it by 1727. It was abolished in 1866 and handed to the city in 1911 — and the transformation into what you see, cemetery and basilica and gardens, is almost entirely the work of two provosts, Václav Štulc and Mikuláš Karlach. The basilica was reconsecrated on 29 June 1903. It has been a national cultural monument since 1962 and a minor basilica since 2003.

The basilica, outside

The two towers are 58 metres and date from 1902–03. They are not Mocker’s: Josef Mocker died in 1899, and the west front and towers were built to the design of his partner František Mikš, the last of three campaigns begun in 1885. A free-standing Baroque bell tower of 1678 was demolished to make room for them.

Look at the central tympanum. Every second guide calls it a mosaic; it is a carved relief of the Last Judgement, by the sculptor Štěpán Zálešák. The mosaics are on the two side portals and are modern, from the early 1990s. Beside the north portal is a plaque of 1941 commemorating the baptism of fourteen Bohemian princes at Regensburg in 845; an identical one hangs on St John’s in Regensburg.

Then look up at the roof from the cemetery side. The re-roofing finished in 2026 used 59,400 slate tiles over 1,650 square metres and restored, for the first time in decades, the ornamental slate pattern Mocker designed in the 1870s.

Inside

The interior is painted to the last square metre, and the attribution matters because most guides get it wrong. The presbytery, the Šance Chapel and both side aisles were painted by the Viennese painter Karl Jobst. The main nave and the piers — the Art Nouveau saints everyone photographs — are by František Urban and Marie Urbanová-Zahradnická, 1902–03, with the upper lunettes added in 1911. The Chapter says the scheme was inspired by Mucha. It does not say Mucha designed it, and neither should anyone else.

Over the entrance is the organ of the Paštík brothers, first played in 1903: two carved neo-Gothic cases rising like towers either side of the west window, about 2,500 pipes, 49 stops, three manuals and pedal, with the console out on the axis of the church. The Chapter calls it one of the finest Romantic organs in the country and is probably right.

In a small room to the left of the door, in the base of a tower, is the treasury — included in your ticket. Most of it is nineteenth and twentieth century, because the chapter was plundered by the Hussites and again by the Passau troops in 1611, but it holds the silver crowns made for the Madonna and Child in 1769, which matters for the reason set out below.

The Madonna of the Rains — and the thing to know about her

Fourth chapel along the south aisle. The picture on the altar is a mid-fourteenth-century Bohemian panel of the Madonna of Humility: the Virgin seated on a flowering meadow, her right foot on a crescent moon, a halo of twelve stars, the Child swaddled in patterned cloth.

Except that it is not. The panel on the altar is a copy, made in the original technique by the restorer Jan Pasálek. The original was restored in the 1980s and 90s — which revealed it had been trimmed top and bottom — and is now permanently in the National Gallery at the Convent of St Agnes. This is the single most useful correction anyone can make about this building. The compensation is that the 1769 silver crowns in the treasury are real, so the ticket does buy you something authentic.

Around 1397 the original was given a partly gilded silver cover cut to the outline of the figures — thirty-five stamped plaques carrying the chapter’s crossed keys, the imperial eagle and the Bohemian lion — and a fragment of the Virgin’s mantle was set under crystal in the clasp of her robe, which made the picture a reliquary as well as an icon. The back once carried the inscription painted by the hand of St Luke.

The name is later, from after 1638. In a drought a canon dreamt he should carry the picture in procession to Emmaus and pray for rain; the rain started before the procession arrived and fell for three days. The processions were repeated in every drought for the next century and a half, and one is recorded as drawing twenty thousand people. Joseph II banned them; they went on anyway. This is also the one chapel where you may light a candle — open flame is forbidden everywhere else in the building.

The chapels, and what hides in them

Ten chapels run down the south aisle, and nearly every one has a Baroque painting by Jan Onghers of about 1700 behind its neo-Gothic furniture — a St Clement, a St Joseph, a St Wenceslas, two different St John of Nepomuks. A few specifics worth walking for.

In the Chapel of St Clement stands a Romanesque stone sarcophagus, an eleventh- or twelfth-century carved chest with a cross in relief, traditionally called the tomb of St Longinus. The dedication is folklore; the monument administration thinks it probably came from the Přemyslid necropolis, which is more interesting anyway. In the Chapel of St Joseph, behind the altar, are wall paintings of about 1400 — among the very few medieval survivals visible in the building. Over the altar in the Chapel of St John of Nepomuk, eighty-three relics were gathered in the 1890s; Nepomuk had been a canon of Vyšehrad from 1389.

In the presbytery, the neo-Gothic high altar of about 1887 is Mocker’s design, carved by Josef Hrubeš, and its mensa is a single block quarried from the chapter’s own quarry. Under the new altar of 1992–95 are the excavated remains of the west apse of the original eleventh-century basilica. The canons’ stalls are Baroque, about 1697, with tip-up seats and sliding desks.

One more thing to look for, in the north aisle: a wall painting of about 1760 over the sacristy door, showing the earlier church and the legend of the Devil’s Column. It is the only place the picture and the object are connected, and the object is outside.

The Rotunda of St Martin

The oldest surviving rotunda in Prague, late eleventh century, built under Vratislav II: internal diameter 6.5 metres, walls up to 95 centimetres thick, an apse projecting 2.2 metres, built of small marlstone ashlar with a four-windowed lantern on top.

Its survival is close to miraculous. Damaged by the Hussites in 1420 and by fire in 1528; used as a gunpowder store in the Thirty Years’ War; hit by Prussian shot in 1757; deconsecrated by Joseph II as superfluous; used as a store, a workshop and housing for the poor; and scheduled for demolition in 1841 to widen the road, saved only by Count Karel Chotek. The chapter bought it back in 1875 for five hundred zlatých, and the neo-Romanesque portal added in the restoration has a tympanum designed after illuminations in the Vyšehrad Codex.

The cannonball walled in beside the window above the south portal is not a generic siege souvenir: it was left there deliberately as a memorial to the Prussian bombardment of 1757. And the rotunda is not a display case — Mass is said inside it every Monday evening and every Saturday morning.

The Devil’s Column

In the Karlach Gardens, in front of the eastern wall of the cemetery: three fragments of stone column, each 160 to 240 centimetres long, about 2,500 kilograms together, leaned into a tripod. They are granodiorite, probably quarried in the lower Sázava valley, and most likely early Gothic columns from the earlier church of St Peter — probably not even from the same column.

The legend is that a Vyšehrad priest bet the devil his soul that the devil could not fetch a column from a Roman church before he finished Mass; St Peter knocked the devil into the sea off Venice three times, and the devil arrived late and hurled the column through the roof, where it broke in three. It is a good story with a paper trail: first published in Latin in 1700, in Czech shortly after, and turned into a free-standing Prague legend by Josef Svátek in 1883. The stones themselves were inside the church until 1787 and were moved to this spot in the 1890s.

The cemetery, and Slavín

A churchyard has been here since the thirteenth century, and it survived Joseph II’s closure of the city graveyards only because a decree of 1785 exempted burial grounds more than five hundred paces beyond the walls. That exemption is the entire reason Vyšehrad, rather than anywhere else, became the national cemetery. It was converted from 1869 by the canon Václav Štulc; the arcades are Antonín Wiehl’s, 1887. About 1,200 graves in 0.81 hectares, and still an active burial ground.

Slavín, 1889–93, is also Wiehl’s, with sculpture by Josef Mauder. It is not a chapel, whatever it looks like: it is a crypt of 44 chambers under a platform, with a sarcophagus above and the winged Genius of the Homeland bending over it, flanked by the Grieving and the Victorious Homeland. Under the sarcophagus is the motto from the deed of gift: Ač zemřeli, ještě mluví — though they died, they still speak. Julius Zeyer was the first in, in 1901; Karel Höger the last, in September 2013, by which point fifty-six people had been interred and one chamber was left.

Mucha is in Slavín, with Myslbek, Štursa and Šaloun among the sculptors, Destinnová, Křižík, Gočár and Rafael Kubelík. Jan Neruda was put in and then taken out again after protests from his housekeeper, and reburied in a nearby grave as he had wanted.

Dvořák is not in Slavín. He died in 1904, was buried nearby, and was moved in 1906 into one of the roofed arcades. For the tenth anniversary of his death Ladislav Šaloun designed the Art Nouveau monument with its weeping-willow motif and bust; the gilded circular cross in mosaic at its foot is regularly mistaken by visitors for a radiation symbol.

Smetana is in grave 5-40, directly opposite Slavín. His funeral was postponed by a day so that he could be buried here rather than in his first wife’s grave at Olšany, and the procession ran from the Týn Church past the National Theatre. The plain granite pylon is Josef Fanta’s, unveiled nine years after the burial; the grave was enlarged in 2012, and the two smaller side obelisks are meant to echo the basilica’s towers. The score of Vltava is cut into the stone at lower left.

Walk it and you find the people who made the place: Mocker and Wiehl are both buried in the cemetery they built, and so is the painter of the nave. Karel Čapek is here; his brother Josef, who died at Bergen-Belsen, has only a cenotaph, as does Milada Horáková. On the Emmaus Benedictines’ tomb near the basilica, an abbot who died in a camp and was never found is commemorated ubidemque sepultus — buried who knows where.

Gates, walls and what is underneath

The Leopold Gate, built 1653–72, probably to a design by Carlo Lurago, is the handsomest thing on the hill after the church — and only the main front of the intended design was ever executed. The Brick Gate to the north is Empire work to a design of 1835 by the military engineer Johann Weiss, and was opened ceremonially in 1841 with the new road. Of the great Gothic Špička gate, once the most conspicuous element of Charles IV’s fortifications, only the northern third of the ground floor survives, with the springers of the vault ribs still there.

The rampart circuit is the best free thing here. The escarpe is brick-faced over stone, battered to shed shot, five metres thick at the base, and over thirteen metres high on average and eighteen in places. The promontory runs about six hundred metres off the Pankrác plain and drops on the south-west in a 42-metre cliff into the Vltava, which is at its deepest anywhere in Prague directly underneath.

Inside Bastion 33 is Gorlice: a barrel-vaulted hall thirteen metres high and about 330 square metres, the largest underground space in historic Prague, which the site’s own guides say came into existence essentially by mistake, through an error by the fortification builder. It now holds six original Baroque statues from Charles Bridge — Jäckel’s St Anne and Madonna with St Bernard, Brokoff’s St Adalbert, Braun’s St Ludmila, and two Kohl figures — with copies standing out on the bridge. Only six: the rest of the bridge originals are in the National Museum’s Lapidarium.

Why this rock, and not another

Almost none of the founding legend belongs here. The official site says so itself: Krok and his daughters were probably somewhere near the Berounka, thirty kilometres away, and Šemík’s leap first appears in Hájek’s chronicle and looks borrowed from a German robber knight. The oldest chronicles connect Vyšehrad to the Maidens’ War and very little else.

What fixed the meaning here was the nineteenth century, and then one piece of music. Smetana’s Má vlast opens with “Vyšehrad”, written in 1874 as he was going deaf, the bard Lumír’s harp sounding the first theme. Má vlast opens the Prague Spring festival every 12 May, the anniversary of Smetana’s death — and Smetana is buried on this hill, facing Slavín. A rock given a tune, by a man now lying under it, played every year on the day he died. That circle is the reason to come.

Don’t miss

• The case of bones in the Šance Chapel Scattered by the Hussites in 1420, gathered up, and in no mainstream guide.
• The Devil’s Column painted over the sacristy door About 1760, in the north aisle. Then go outside and look at the stones.
• The medieval wall paintings behind the St Joseph altar About 1400, and easy to walk past entirely.
• The slate pattern on the roof Mocker’s 1870s design, back for the first time in decades. Look from the cemetery.
• Mocker’s and Wiehl’s own graves The men who built the cemetery are buried in it.

Insider tips

Book anything underground before you travel. Everything below ground is timed and guided now, and the popular route sells out days ahead; the plain casemate tours usually do not.

Come in by the Brick Gate if you can face the climb. It delivers you straight to the casemates and the ramparts, and the metro entrance puts you at the wrong end of a long site.

Check the basilica’s exceptions list before you go. It closes to sightseeing for weddings, funerals and concerts more often than most churches, and the dates are published week by week.

More in Prague

• St Vitus Cathedral — the other Prague hill, and the one that won.
• Basilica of St George — the Přemyslid church that survived where this one did not.
• All the churches worth visiting in Prague