National Monument at Vítkov

Listen first. Up here the noise of Prague drops away to a low hum. You may hear wind moving through the trees on the slope, and perhaps a train somewhere below. Under your feet the paving is wide and open. In front of you rises a long, pale block of stone, and in front of that is a bronze horseman, dark against the sky. This is the National Monument at Vítkov, and the hill it stands on has carried the weight of Czech memory for six hundred years.

Let us start with the hill itself. Vítkov is a long, narrow ridge on the eastern edge of central Prague. On one side lies the old working district of Karlín. On the other side lies Žižkov, a neighbourhood of tenement blocks, steep streets and old pubs. The ridge is green and quiet now, a place for dog walkers and joggers. But in the summer of 1420 this slope was a battlefield, and the result of that battle shaped how Czechs would see themselves for centuries.

That battle belongs to the Hussite Wars. The Hussites were followers of Jan Hus, a Prague preacher and reformer who was burned at the stake in 1415 for his teaching. His death caused a deep crisis in Bohemia. The Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund led a crusade against the Hussites and brought a large army to Prague. The defenders were badly outnumbered. Here on Vítkov, a small Hussite force held the ridge against the crusaders — and won.

The commander linked to that victory is the man on the horse in front of you. His name was Jan Žižka. He was an experienced soldier from the lower nobility, and he had lost the sight in one eye. Later, the story goes, he lost the other eye too, yet he kept leading his troops. Žižka became famous for using farm wagons as moving fortresses. The district of Žižkov below you carries his name, and so does this hill in popular memory.

Now look up at the statue. It is the work of the Czech sculptor Bohumil Kafka, and it is one of the largest bronze equestrian statues in the world. Kafka spent many years on it, studying horses closely to get the muscles and posture right. Here is a detail most visitors miss. Kafka died during the Second World War, before the statue was cast. He never saw his finished horseman standing on the hill. The bronze was only unveiled in 1950.

Walk a few steps to one side and study the statue from below. Žižka sits heavy and still, gripping a mace. The horse is broad and strong, more a war animal than an elegant parade horse. The scale is meant to press down on you a little. Up close, you can see the surface of the bronze, with its darker and lighter patches where rain and weather have worked on the metal over the decades.

Behind the statue stands the building itself. Its shape is simple and severe — long, flat, clad in pale stone, with very little decoration on the outside. It was designed by the architect Jan Zázvorka and built between the late 1920s and the late 1930s. Its first purpose was not about the Hussites at all. It was a memorial to the Czechoslovak Legions, the volunteer soldiers who fought abroad in the First World War for an independent state.

That new state, Czechoslovakia, was born in 1918. The monument was meant to honour the people who had fought for it, and to give the young republic a ceremonial heart. Inside there is a tomb for an unknown soldier. There are also halls decorated with mosaics and stonework by leading Czech artists of the time. The building was a statement in stone: this country has a past, and it has earned its freedom.

Then history turned, and the building turned with it. In 1939 Nazi Germany occupied the Czech lands. During the occupation the monument lost its patriotic role, and German forces used it for military purposes, including storage. A memorial to freedom fighters became part of the machinery of an occupying army. When the war ended in 1945, the building stood again on a hill above a city that had changed deeply.

The strangest chapter came next, and it is the one that surprises most visitors. After the Communist takeover in 1948, the regime made the monument its own. When the Communist leader Klement Gottwald died in 1953, his body was embalmed and placed on display here, in the manner of Lenin in Moscow. A team of specialists worked to preserve it. The embalming did not hold well. In 1962 the body was removed and cremated, and the mausoleum was closed.

So one building now carries several layers of meaning. A Hussite victory. The Legions of the First World War. A Nazi storage site. A Communist leader's tomb. Today the monument is managed by the National Museum, and it hosts an exhibition about the turning points of Czech and Slovak history in the twentieth century. Some of the technical rooms from the mausoleum years can also be seen on certain tours, and they are an unusual, sober sight.

Before you leave, try to reach the roof terrace if it is open during your visit. From up there the whole city spreads out to the west. You can pick out the towers of the Old Town, the long line of Prague Castle on its hill, and the red roofs of Žižkov and Karlín close below. It is one of the best places to understand how Prague sits in its river valley, with ridges and hills around it.

As you turn to go, look once more at the horseman and the pale stone behind him. They were made for different reasons, in different decades, under different governments. Yet they stand together now, facing the same city. Walk down slowly through the trees toward Žižkov, and notice how quickly the quiet of the hill gives way to the sound of trams, voices and ordinary life — the life all these layers of history were, in the end, about.