Old Town Square

The square opens suddenly, wide and bright after the narrow lanes. The sound of the crowd rises around you on every side. Towers point up into the sky in all directions. Underfoot, the old stones have been worn smooth by centuries of feet. In the middle of it all, people stand with their heads tilted back, waiting for a clock to come alive.

This is the Old Town Square, the very heart of the old city. For more than eight hundred years people have gathered on this spot. Once it was a market, full of stalls and carts and the noise of trade. Goods came from far away to be bought and sold on these stones. Today the market is gone, but the gathering still goes on.

The most famous sight here is the astronomical clock. It is set into the wall of the old town hall, a tall face of gold and deep blue. The clock was first made in 1410, which makes it one of the oldest of its kind still working anywhere in the world. Its hands have turned steadily for more than six hundred years.

The clock does far more than tell the hour. Its great dial shows the sun and the moon moving through the sky. It marks the old hours, the place of the stars, and the slow turning of the seasons. To read it fully takes real study. To enjoy it takes only a glance, for the colors and circles are beautiful on their own.

On the hour, the clock comes to life. Two small windows open in the wall above the dial. One by one, figures of the twelve apostles move slowly past the windows, each in its turn. Beside the clock, a small skeleton figure pulls a cord and rings a bell. The crowd below falls quiet, then claps once the short show is done.

An old story is told about the maker of the clock. The legend says the city blinded him so that he could never build such a clock for anyone else. In his anger, he is said to have reached into the works and stopped them with his hands. It is only a legend, with little proof, but people still repeat it here.

Across the square rise two dark and pointed towers. They belong to a great Gothic church, the Church of Our Lady before Týn. The towers climb about eighty meters into the sky, each tipped with sharp stone spires. They are not quite the same, for one is a little broader than the other, and that small difference is easy to see.

The front of the church hides behind a row of houses, so its doors are easy to miss. But the towers themselves can never be missed. They rise high above the rooftops and can be seen from far across the whole city. At sunset they turn black against the colored sky, like two dark crowns standing over the square.

On another side of the square stands a white church in a softer, rounder style. Its pale stone and gentle curves set it well apart from the sharp Gothic towers nearby. Inside, daylight falls through tall windows onto smooth white walls. The two churches, one dark and pointed, one white and round, quietly show two very different ages of building.

In the center of the square stands a memorial cast in dark metal. It shows a standing man surrounded by other figures, some rising up, some bowed low. The man was a preacher and reformer who lived in this city long ago. He was burned for his beliefs in 1415. The memorial was raised five hundred years later, in 1915.

Around the edges of the square, the old houses are painted in soft colors. Fronts of pink, cream, and pale gold stand shoulder to shoulder in a long row. Many of them carry carved signs and fine stonework above their doors. Cafés spill out onto the stones, and the smell of coffee drifts past you as you walk.

The square changes with the hours of the day. In the early morning it is calm, and the stones are still cool. By midday it fills with people from every land, all looking up at the same clock. In winter, wooden market stalls fill the open space, and the smell of roasting nuts and warm spiced wine hangs in the cold air.

Stand here long enough and you begin to feel the square breathe. The clock strikes, the crowd gathers and parts, the towers keep their long watch. People have done just this for centuries, looking up, waiting, marking the passing of the hour. In that simple act, repeated again and again, you join a very old habit of the city.