Old Town Hall

The Old Town Hall stands in the middle of Old Town Square, Prague’s oldest civic building. It began in 1338 when the town council bought a patrician house and turned it into their meeting place. Over centuries the original structure was absorbed by later additions, leaving only a Gothic stone portal on the west side as a visible trace of the 14th-century start. A tall square tower, finished in 1364, became the city’s tallest medieval structure and still rises above the square. The hall is actually many smaller houses joined together, each added in different periods: Mikeš house in 1458, the Cockerel house in 1835, and the Minute house in 1896. The building’s architecture shows Gothic, Renaissance and Neo-Gothic layers side by side. The Late Gothic portal of the Volflin house, completed around 1500, carries rich stone ornaments and a royal monogram of Vladislaus II. Inside, the council chamber has a net vault from the same period, giving the room a spacious feel. The east wing, built at the turn of the 15th and 16th centuries, housed the main council room until war damage in 1945. The south wing’s facade mixes Renaissance windows with later Neo-Gothic gables, while the Minute house still shows 17th-century sgraffito scenes on its outer walls. Visitors enter through the Late Gothic hall with its ribbed vault and two large mosaics by Mikoláš Aleš and Vojtěch Ignác Ullmann. One mosaic shows Princess Libuše foretelling Prague’s future, the other “Slavdom’s Homage to Prague.” The tower’s interior can be climbed for a view over the square. The Romanesque hall in the Cockerel house, dating from the 13th century, remains one of the oldest parts of the complex. Despite later reconstructions, the mixture of styles tells the story of Prague’s civic life across seven centuries.