St Vitus Cathedral

Church · Prague Castle (Hradčany)Prague,Czechia

A Gothic cathedral inside Prague Castle that took 585 years to finish, its jewel-set Wenceslas chapel and modern glass throwing colour across the stone.

St Vitus Cathedral fills the middle of Prague Castle, and the surprise inside is the colour. Its glass is twentieth-century rather than medieval, and on a bright afternoon it throws the whole spectrum across the stone. The strangest room is the chapel of St Wenceslas, whose lower walls are set with over a thousand slabs of polished jasper and amethyst. In the triforium above, a row of carved heads looks down — the men who built and paid for the church, cut as portraits. The building took 585 years. Charles IV began it in 1344 with Matthias of Arras from Avignon; when he died, a young German mason named Peter Parler took over and gave the choir its net vaults. Then the Hussite wars stopped the work, and it stayed stopped for four centuries. The western front, the nave and the rose window are barely a hundred years old, and the consecration came in 1929. From the floor the join is invisible — the shafts run up unbroken and the eye goes with them.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Look for the signed faces in the gallery — Parler carved a row of portrait busts of the people who paid for and built the cathedral, including himself, which almost nobody did in the 1370s.
The nave fills from the door inward — the first bay is a standstill by late morning while the far end stays walkable, so keep moving past the entrance instead of stopping with everyone else.
The south tower stair is the unglamorous one — a tight spiral of 287 steps with no lift, and it puts you above the castle roofline with the whole red-roofed city underneath.

Things to do

1
Wait for the sun to reach the glass
Stand in the middle of the nave in the early afternoon and watch the floor rather than the windows. The colours track slowly across the stone and up the piers, and the whole interior changes temperature over about twenty minutes.
2
Read the faces in the triforium
High around the choir runs a row of carved heads: the emperor, his wives, the archbishops and the two architects. Use the zoom on your phone. Parler put his own face among the patrons, which in the fourteenth century came close to insolence.
3
Climb the south tower
287 steps in a spiral that narrows as it goes, with no room to pass anyone coming down. The top opens onto the castle roofs from directly above, the bell chamber holds the largest bell in the country, and the city runs out to the horizon.
4
Look into the Wenceslas chapel from the threshold
Nobody goes in: the chapel is closed at both doorways and you look from the edge. The lower walls carry more than a thousand slabs of polished jasper and amethyst set into gilded plaster, with painted scenes of the Passion above them, laid out in the 1370s. It is the oldest decorated room in the cathedral and the one part that was never rebuilt.