Old Town Square & Astronomical Clock

Landmark · Old Town (Staré Město)Prague,Czechia

Prague's thousand-year-old market square, ringed by Gothic and Baroque house fronts, with the world's oldest working astronomical clock performing on the town hall wall.

Old Town Square is the thousand-year-old centre of Prague, and the thing everyone stands in it for is the Orloj on the town hall wall. Its main dial is not a clock face but a model of the sky, tracking the sun and the moon through the zodiac and keeping Old Bohemian time, which counted the hours from sunset. On the hour a skeleton tips an hourglass and pulls a rope, twelve apostles slide past two windows above, and a cockerel crows — the whole performance lasts under a minute. The clock has been running on this wall since 1410, which makes it the oldest astronomical clock still in operation. The square around it has been market, execution ground and parade route, and each century added house fronts without removing the older ones — Gothic gables, Baroque facades and pastel Rococo along one terrace. The twin black spires of the Týn church rise behind the houses on the eastern side. In the middle of the cobbles is the bronze Jan Hus, placed there in 1915, five hundred years after he was burned.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Stand to the side, not underneath — the show is on a wall, and from directly below you get elbows and the undersides of the figures. Ten metres off to either side is a cleaner view.
Two or three minutes before the hour, not ten — the waiting is better spent on the square than pinned against the tower with everybody else.
The apostles are younger than they look — the wooden figures burned in May 1945 and were carved again by hand afterwards, and the calendar dial below is a copy of a nineteenth-century painting.

Things to do

1
Watch the hour from the corner of the Little Square
Pick a spot near the corner of the Little Square rather than under the dials. You will see the apostles clearly through both windows and the cockerel at the top, and — better — the faces of two hundred people all looking up at the same moment.
2
Climb the town hall tower
A lift or a spiral ramp takes you up to an open gallery near the top. From there the square's true shape appears, the Týn spires rise straight ahead of you, and the red roofs run out toward the castle ridge across the river.
3
Read the clock instead of watching it
Stand at the dials for five minutes. The golden hand marks Old Bohemian hours counted from sunset, a small star tracks the stars rather than the sun, and the sun's arm gives you both the time and the season. Three calendars run on one face.