Fanta Building at the Main Station

Landmark · Wilsonova / Vrchlického sady, New Town (Nové Město)Prague,Czechia

The Art Nouveau hall of Prague's main station, stranded a floor above the concourse everyone hurries through, over the platform Winton's children left from.

The Fanta Building is the old hall of Prague's main station, and almost nobody in the station sees it. Josef Fanta gave it a dome, glass, ironwork, allegorical figures and a pair of towers between 1901 and 1909. Then a through-road and a concrete concourse were driven underneath in the 1970s, and the hall was left marooned one floor up with its entrances cut off. You get to it by going upstairs, against the direction everybody else is moving. On platform 1 below, between March and August 1939, eight trains carried 669 children out of the country on papers arranged from London by Nicholas Winton and his colleagues. Their parents said goodbye on that platform and mostly did not survive. A ninth train, with about 250 children on it, was due to leave on 1 September 1939 and never did. Two memorials stand on the platform now. The deportation trains ran from a different station nearby.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Stand under the dome and look at the glass and ironwork — this was built as the front door of a capital, and the detail was designed to be seen by people arriving rather than by people shopping.
Read what the 1970s did — the road and concourse driven under the old building are the reason the hall survives unused above your head, and both layers are legible from the stairs between them.
Daytime, and with a purpose — this is a working main station, busiest at rush hours, and the upper hall is more pleasant and better lit in the middle of the day.

Things to do

1
Take the stairs against the crowd
From the concourse, find the way up into the old building and go. Everybody else is heading down to the platforms or out to the park. One flight up the noise drops, the ceiling opens, and you are standing in the hall that was the entrance to Prague for half a century, with almost nobody in it.
2
Meet the figures on platform 1
Go down to platform 1 and find the memorials. One is a statue of the man who organised the rescue; the other puts children and a parting at your own height, on the platform floor. Standing among them while a train comes in is the point — this happened here, on an ordinary working platform.