St Vitus Cathedral was begun in 1344 and consecrated in 1929 — a building site with a 585-year run. Charles IV brought in Matthias of Arras from Avignon; when he died, a young German mason named Peter Parler took over and gave the choir the net vaults and carved portrait heads that made his name. Then the Hussite wars stopped the work, and for four hundred years the finished eastern half stood walled off from a stump of nave, with a Renaissance spire on a half-built tower. The western front, the nave and the rose window are barely a century old.
Inside, the join is invisible from the floor: the shafts run up unbroken and the eye goes with them. The colour is the surprise — twentieth-century glass, not medieval, and on a bright afternoon it throws the whole spectrum across the stone. The chapel of St Wenceslas is the strangest room, its lower walls set with over a thousand slabs of polished jasper and amethyst. The Bohemian crown jewels are locked in the chamber above it.