Charles Bridge celebrates 665 years: It was destroyed by floods, it influenced the history of Prague and the whole country
A legend in a minute
The foundation stone of the Charles Bridge was laid by Charles IV himself. exactly at 5:31 in the morning on 7/9/1357. He believed that the number series connecting the year, date and time (1-3-5-7-9-7-5-3-1) would bring luck to the building. But the famous rumor has a catch: medieval time measurement (water clocks, sundials or candle clocks) could not determine the time to the minute.
“While the best water clocks showed the time on the quarter hour, the measurement of minutes, although initially inaccurate, perfected until the widespread use and making of mechanical clocks. Although the minute hand may have existed as early as the late 15th century according to contemporary records, its invention is credited to the Swiss mathematician, astronomer and inventor, court clockmaker to Emperor Rudolph II, Jost Burgi, who invented it in 1577. Yet it took more than a century for this technology has spread,” writes Ondrej Varga v an internet blog about watches.
Torture and death. Some of the leaders of the estate uprising were to be quartered alive
Burgi’s clock in a crystal case, made in Prague, was, according to Vargy, the very first clock with a second hand.
The rumor about the number series associated with the connection of the Charles Bridge probably comes from a much younger time, as evidenced by the fact that even the date of July 9 is not completely certain. Although another legend tells that on the ninth day of the year 1357, in the part of the sky below the horizon that was yet to emerge (in the so-called ascendant), the constellation Leo was present – while the lion was the heraldic emblem of the Czech kings from the mid-13th century, and June was also the celestial sign controlling Prague and Bohemia – the fact remains that this date only appears again in younger chronicles.
Another legend about the foundation of the Charles Bridge, which tells about raw eggs being added to the mortar (except for those from Velvar, which the local councilors allegedly sent boiled), may have a rational core, because eggs were actually used as a binder.
The old bridge and the young architect
But what do we know for sure about the creation of the famous stone bridge? Certainly, it was not the first, because it replaced the older Romanesque Judith bridge, between 1158 and 1172, which was one of the oldest European stone bridges located north of the Alps (some of its arches can still be seen today in the basement of the Malostran house U Zlatá hvězda or in the old town side of the river in the canal below Křižovnický náměstí, its Malostran Juditina Tower forms the base of the northernmost of the two Malostran towers of the Charles Bridge).
This bridge was destroyed by a great flood on February 3, 1342, and its destruction marked the basic impulse for the construction of a new, even grander and larger bridge.
They killed his mother-in-law, captured his wife. Paradoxically, it helped Sigismund to the throne in Hungary
We also know that Karel also commissioned the construction of this second bridge to the twenty-five-year-old Swabian architect, builder, sculptor and stonemason Petr Parler, who at that time was already working on the construction of the St. Vitus Cathedral.
It is hard to say what was going through the very young architect’s mind at that moment, but it is certain that he was not afraid of his task. You are a solid, high-spanning bridge on sixteen arches, which adorned the first inner pillar of the new Old Town bridge tower, which differed from the previous towers of the Judith bridge by its unique sculptural decoration.
During the 14th century, the first stone decoration also appeared on the bridge itself: a cross with the body of the crucified Christ was built on the third pillar on the right on the way from the Old Town. However, the unique gallery of 30 statues and sculptures that adorn the bridge today was still a long way off. This extraordinary collection of sculptures mainly dates from the years 1707 to 1714 and represents representative works of a number of well-known Czech high-baroque sculptors; St. is among the most valuable. Luitgard by Matyáš Bernard Braun and a whole series of works by Ferdinand Maxmilian Brokoff.
A stone witness of history
The construction of the bridge placed Prague in an important place among the medieval trade centers and stops, and at the same time gave the capital a crucial structure around which the city’s history began to revolve.
In 1393, Wenceslas IV gave it was from this bridge that the martyred body of Vicar General John of Nepomuk was thrown into the river, thereby “meriting” one of the world’s most important world cults, since John of Nepomuk, as the patron saint of bridges, began to be worshiped not only in Bohemia but throughout Europe from the 18th century and soon throughout the then known Christian world, especially in South America.
Three stab wounds in the dark. The most mysterious Czech murder has been waiting to be solved for hundreds of years
The bridge also played a role in many sieges and conquests of Prague. In 1611 during the invasion of the troops of Archduke Leopold of Pasovský, in 1648 during the conquest of Prague by the Swedes, in 1848 during the uprising against the Habsburg Monarchy, during all these historical events, the current place where the people of Prague prevented the enemy troops from being occupied by the left was most in the center of the action shore. The right also conquered the Vltava.
For all these centuries, however, the bridge was known only as Kamenný or Pražský – the name Charles Bridge, under which we know it today, was used until around 1870 at the earlier initiative of Karel Havlíček Borovský.
Floods and a stone bridge
Over the centuries, the Charles Bridge has been repeatedly threatened and even destroyed by floods, similar to the one that created it when it destroyed the previous Judith Bridge in 1342.
The construction of the new bridge itself was interrupted five times and threatened by high water. It happened in the years 1359, 1367, 1370, 1373 and 1374. The first collapse of five bridge piers under the pressure of a flood occurred in 1432, when a devastating flood flooded a large part of the Old Town.
One of the most terrible water disasters hit Prague in February 1784. The previous winter was extreme and long even by the standards of the time, it started to freeze already on St. Martin’s Day 1783. Ice formed on the Vltava so thick that after that wagons of several meters could pass near Mělník. In some places, the thickness of the ice exceeded one meter. Up to seven meters of snow fell in Šumava.
Blood spilled under the door. They wanted to conceal the execution of Jan Želivský, but it didn’t work out
When it began to melt in late February, the ground was heavily frozen and the snow could not absorb the rapidly melting snow, which turned into streams of water flowing into rivers. But the rivers were also frozen for a long time and now their beds are blocked by huge ice floes.
On Friday, February 27, 1784, so much water flooded Pilsen and tore down all its wooden bridges. People fled to the roofs of houses, the streets were completely under water. Pilsen was followed by České Budějovice and Strakonice. Even Písek, Beroun and Mělník were spared the devastating flood waves.
Flood in 1872, driftwood near the piers of the Charles Bridge
Prague was flooded the next morning. In just twelve hours, it rose four meters above its original level and flooded a large part of the Old Town up to Malá náměstí, the whole of Kampa and the area of today’s Karlín. On the Charles Bridge, the sixth bridge pillar was hit the hardest, as a huge hail struck it, which caused the collapse of the anti-flood header and the military guardhouse, where five soldiers were staying at the time.
A day later, another ice floe damaged the eighth pillar of the bridge and threw one of the two angels from the statue of St. into the water for 220 years. Wenceslas. It was rediscovered only at the end of the winter of 2004, when its torso was fished out by divers from the Vltava near the Charles Bridge. Today it stands together with the other original sculptures from the Charles Bridge in the Lapidary of the National Museum.
Hanzlík and Brodský. Charles IV several well-known actors have already played
Another collapse of the Charles Bridge occurred during a flood on September 4, 1890. The high water that morning collapsed three bridge arches, and along with them, several early morning pedestrians fell into the foaming rushing Vltava and perished. Unfortunately, they were not the only victims of this living disaster. Already at night, twenty soldiers drowned in Karlín, who were dismantling the training pontoon bridge. They were swept away by the logs from the shattered rafts. Many years later, this tragic event became one of the chapters of the children’s book Tales of the Old River by the writer and adventurer František Běhounk.
When the Charles Bridge was saved by an excavator
It will be 20 years since the last big flood in 2002 in just one month. The first wave hit Prague on August 8-9, 2002, the second, bigger and more devastating, on August 14, when Karlín and the Prague metro were flooded. Residents of neighborhoods around the river had to be evacuated.
This time, the Charles Bridge was protected by an excavator with a long arm, which was called by the Prague firefighter Václav Kratochvíl. The dredger was positioned directly on the bridge, using a grapple to catch large pieces of floating debris and direct them so that they float between the piers.
Even so, the onslaught of water was so great that, according to Kratochvíl’s recollections, around the second morning of August 14th, it literally shook and vibrated about half of it. But he didn’t fall apart.
Celebrations of the 665th anniversary of the laying of the foundation stone of the Charles Bridge
The celebrations organized by the Charles Bridge Museum will begin on Saturday, July 9, 2022 at exactly 5:31 a.m. with the procession of Charles IV. across the Charles Bridge. The emperor will be accompanied by a medieval troupe of knights on horseback, supplemented by period musicians and dancers. During the day, there will be real lectures about historical bridges and period performances. On the original terrain of the Judith Bridge from 1169, i.e. in front of the Charles Bridge Museum, a new exhibition “Prague Stone” will be opened on stone processing in the 14th century. In the museum itself, visitors will then be presented with annual works by students of the Academy of Fine Arts on the theme of the fourth baroque angel from the Marian Column on Old Town Square in Prague. This angel was destroyed during the Prussian siege of Prague in 1757, and his image was preserved only on a few period graphics. According to the organizers, entry to the Charles Bridge Museum will be free from five to ten in the morning.