Prague, Old Town Square and the Týn Church: Vintage Travel Poster from a c. 1900 Photograph
PRAGUE, in tall dark green capitals, fills the top of the sheet, under a small medallion with the silhouette of a spired city. Below, on a cream ribbon, come the words Old Town Square and Týn Church, and beneath them, in red, Bohemia. Inside a frame of green stems, cream lilies and coral blossoms, the twin Gothic towers of the Týn Church rise above a row of gabled houses with arcades at street level, under a summer sky, each tower crowned with a cluster of dark spires and a small clock on the gable between them. On the left stands the tower of the Old Town Hall with the gilded dials of its astronomical clock, and across the sunlit cobbles strolls a Belle Époque crowd: a gentleman with a walking stick, ladies in long dresses, a horse-drawn carriage and a row of white market umbrellas. This poster comes from a photograph of the square taken around 1900 by the Prague photographer Jindřich Eckert and now in the Prague City Archives.
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Original photograph: view of the south-east side of Old Town Square at the mouth of Celetná Street, by Jindřich Eckert, about 1900 (Prague City Archives, reference VIII 546; public domain)
Interpretation: Sapiens Verbum
Subject: Old Town Square with the Church of Our Lady before Týn and the Old Town Hall with its astronomical clock
Location: Old Town Square (Staroměstské náměstí), Old Town, Prague, Czech Republic
Medium: Art Nouveau travel-poster interpretation of a public-domain photograph
Lettering: PRAGUE · Old Town Square · Týn Church · Bohemia
Series: Vintage Travel Posters from Old Photographs
This poster treats its source freely, and says so. The photograph looks along the south-east side of the square: the Týn Church on the left, seen at an angle above the houses in front of it, the tall Marian column in the middle of the open cobbles with a few handcarts resting near its base, and the mouth of Celetná Street opening between the houses on the right. The poster brings the church round to face the viewer, so that its two towers stand side by side in the centre, and adds the tower of the Old Town Hall and its astronomical clock on the left, which in reality stands on the opposite side of the square. The Marian column is left out, and the empty square of the photograph fills with people, a carriage and market umbrellas. The grey print becomes warm stone, terracotta roofs and a blue summer sky. The frame is pure Art Nouveau, whiplash stems in sage, ochre and gold with pale lilies in the corners, and the small medallions at the top and bottom repeat the spired skyline of the city.
Two towers over the Old Town
The Church of Our Lady before Týn has been the main church of this part of the city since the fourteenth century. It takes its name from the Týn, the courtyard behind it where foreign merchants lodged, and an earlier church on the site was built for those merchants. The present Gothic church was begun in the fourteenth century, and in the fifteenth it became a centre of the Hussites, the followers of the reformer Jan Hus. The gable and the northern tower were finished under the Hussite king George of Poděbrady, whose statue was placed on the gable below a great golden chalice, the Hussite symbol, and the southern tower was completed only in 1511 by the architect Matěj Rejsek. The two towers are 80 metres high, and each spire is topped by eight smaller spires in two layers of four (Church of Our Lady before Týn).
After the Catholic victory at the White Mountain in 1620, the statue of the “heretic king” and the chalice were taken down in 1626 and replaced by a statue of the Virgin Mary, whose great halo was made by melting down the chalice. Inside the church lies the astronomer Tycho Brahe, under a tombstone of 1601. The main entrance is still reached as it was in Eckert’s day, through a narrow passage between the houses that stand in front of the church.
The clock on the Old Town Hall
The tower on the left of the poster carries the most famous clock in Europe. The Prague astronomical clock, the Orloj, is mounted on the southern wall of the Old Town Hall, and its oldest parts, the clockwork and the astronomical dial, were made in 1410 by the clockmaker Mikuláš of Kadaň and Jan Šindel, a professor of mathematics and astronomy at the university. The old story that a master called Hanuš built it around 1490 and was blinded so that he could never build another is a legend. The dial shows the positions of the Sun and the Moon, a calendar dial with the months was added below, and every hour the figure of Death rings a bell while the twelve apostles appear at two small windows above the dial. The clock was badly damaged in May 1945, during the Prague uprising, and started working again in 1948 (Prague astronomical clock). It is often described as the oldest astronomical clock in the world that is still working.
The square itself has changed more than its buildings. The Marian column in Eckert’s photograph, raised shortly after the Thirty Years’ War, was pulled down on 3 November 1918, days after Czechoslovakia declared its independence from the Habsburg empire, and a new column was raised on the same spot only in 2020. The monument to Jan Hus that now dominates the square was unveiled in 1915, for the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, so it does not appear in the photograph either (Old Town Square).
The photograph behind it
The source is a photograph by Jindřich Eckert, born in Prague in 1833 and one of the leading photographers of the city in the second half of the nineteenth century, who worked until his death in 1905 (Jindřich Eckert). The Prague City Archives, which keep the print under the reference VIII 546, describe it as a view of the south-east side of Old Town Square, at the mouth of Celetná Street, around 1900. The picture is taken from low down on the cobbles: the Týn Church fills the left side, its towers bristling with spires, the Marian column rises against a pale sky in the centre, and on the right the tall houses at the corner of Celetná carry shop signs and awnings. The square is almost empty, apart from a few handcarts and a passer-by or two, which suggests an early hour. The image is in the public domain and has been published, slightly cropped and restored, on Wikimedia Commons. The poster keeps the church, the arcaded houses and the cobbles, and adds the clock tower, the crowd, the summer and the colour.
Seeing the view today
Old Town Square lies in the heart of Prague’s Old Town, between Wenceslas Square and the Charles Bridge. Stand near the corner where Celetná Street enters the square and you have the photograph’s view, with the Týn Church above the houses on your left and the new Marian column in the open square. Turn round to face the Old Town Hall and you will find the astronomical clock on its southern side, where crowds gather on the hour to watch the apostles. The tower of the Old Town Hall can be climbed for a view over the whole square.
The series continues with Amsterdam, Dam Square and the Nieuwe Kerk and Vienna, The Staatsoper and the Ringstrasse, made from a stereo photograph of 1906, with Paris, The Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro, Venice, The Grand Canal and Santa Maria della Salute and Amalfi, From the Cappuccini, all made from photochroms of the 1890s, and Lisbon, Praça do Comércio and the Tagus, and began with Fene, Paisaje de Maniños, a poster made from a 1932 postcard of the Ría de Ferrol.
Bring Belle Époque Prague to your wall in the style of a golden-age travel poster. This Art Nouveau poster of Old Town Square and the Týn Church is available as a museum-quality print, canvas or poster, and it can also be licensed for your own project.
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Part of the Vintage Travel Poster series.
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