Prague looked completely different 200 years ago. Why did she lose the most important thing?
The walls protected Prague from attacks from time immemorial, but only rarely did they fulfill their role as the way in which military art developed, in fact they were a thing of the past in the second half of the 19th century.
The last wave of fortifications, ie the construction of the so-called New Walls, permanently lasted about three quarters of a century. Between 1650 and 1730, Prague was gripped by a strip of Baroque fortifications, which, rather than to defend against the enemy, ultimately served to easily collect tolls and the whole from the people heading to the city.
Moreover, even the latest fortifications were not carried out very well from a military point of view. A number of ridges, such as Vítkov or Letná, remained without protection, from where the enemy could shell Prague from artillery.
“Above all, the fortification was created too simply … only Vyšehrad was evaluated as a full-fledged citadel, especially due to the inaccessible terrain …, but its location on the southern edge of Prague significantly reduced its strategic value,” writes historian Vladimír Kupka in the Prague Fortifications.
Massive walls, sometimes more than 12 meters high, 14 meters long, thirty bastions protruded from them and people could enter the city through ten gates in the 1960s.
In addition to them, there was also a special railway gate, which allowed trains to enter the inner part of the first Prague railway station (today’s Masaryk). But at night, as in the Middle Ages, the city closed in the middle of the last century.
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The walls did not only limit traffic from the countryside to Prague (and vice versa), but also significantly limited the possibilities for further expansion of the city. There was, for example, an order according to which “at the distance of a cannon shot, ie about one kilometer, only temporary structures could be built outside the fortifications, which, in addition, the soldiers could have demolished in case of danger. On the other hand, as early as the 1930s, the Prague walls began to be used for completely non-military purposes.
A five-meter-wide promenade was built between 1827 and 1830 on the part of the fortifications between Těšnov and the Horse Gate in the upper part of Wenceslas Square. Sand-strewn paths next to it under planted trees, among flowers and shrubs.
This part of the castle became a popular place of reception for Praguers, who, in addition to gazebos from the 1950s, also used two cafés to relax. It was in this part that new towns began to grow on the other side of the walls, ie Vinohrady (with later separated Žižkov) and Karlín.
Looking at the map, it is interesting that in this part of Prague almost nothing of the former fortifications has been preserved. The demolition of the walls, which began on July 20, 1874 at four o’clock in the morning in the places where the Museum of the Capital City of Prague is today, affected mainly the eastern bank of the Vltava, ie with the exit of the Vyšehrad fortress and part of the fortifications above the Nuselský valley. On the other hand, most of the bastions and hundreds of meters high brick walls have been preserved from the fortifications on the other side of the river.
However, the liquidation of the walls around Prague was not easy or cheap, simply because the Austro-Hungarian mayor now refused to give them up free of charge. However, the Prague deputies were not aware of how important the liquidation of the fortified belt is for the development of the city, and they did not regret the money spent. After all, even in the first years of operation of today’s Central Station, which was opened in 1871, they had to go through the Horse Gate before they reached them.