St Nicholas Church, Malá Strana

Church · Malá Strana — Malostranské náměstíPrague,Czechia

A vast Prague Baroque church whose bell tower belongs to the city, with a secret-police watch post near the top.

St Nicholas is a Baroque church built at a scale that is hard to take in from the floor. Jan Lukáš Kracker painted the life of St Nicholas across the nave vault in one continuous scene, and František Xaver Palko filled the dome seventy metres above your head. The organ carries more than four thousand pipes, the largest of them six metres long, and Mozart played it in 1787. The bell tower beside the church is a separate building with a separate owner. The tower belongs to the city rather than to the church, and after 1925 the rooms inside it were let as an ordinary flat. From 1964 to 1990 the secret police used one near the top to watch the American, West German and British embassies in the streets below. You pass it on the way up: 215 steps to a gallery at sixty-five metres, with the roofs of Malá Strana underneath. The Jesuits raised the church itself between 1703 and 1752, under three architects from one family.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Buy for the church and the tower separately, at two different doors — They are run by different owners, and a ticket for one is worth nothing at the other, which catches people out every day.
Stand in the middle of the nave first — The vault is painted as one scene rather than a set of panels, and only from the centre does it read correctly.
Evening concerts take over the nave — They are not the church's own worship and they close the building to ordinary visiting, so check before planning a late afternoon here.

Things to do

1
Stand under the dome and find the join
Walk to the crossing and look straight up into the dome, seventy metres above the floor. Then drop your eyes to where the painted dome meets the painted vault of the nave. Two different painters worked either side of that line, and the change of hand shows in the faces once you know to look for it.
2
Climb to the watchers' window
Take the tower stair and stop at the observation room rather than pushing straight up to the gallery. It is a small bare room with one window, and the window looks down into the streets where the western embassies stood. Pick their roofs out of the view and you are doing precisely what the room was kept for.
3
Wait for the organ to be played
If a rehearsal or a service is running, stay for it. The instrument has more than four thousand pipes, the longest of them six metres, and the sound arrives through a room built to carry it. Mozart sat at this organ in 1787, which is the one fact about the church every Prague guide repeats.