OK. So I lied. There will be more than three pages about Praha.
I've seen all of the Bugs Bunny cartoons, and the Pražský Hrad
(Praha Castle) doesn't look like any castle that I've seen in any of them.
The "castle" is actually an oblong ring of very large buildings
along the ridge of a hill with the difficult to miss Chrám Svatého
Vita (St. Vitus's Cathedral) in the middle of the ring.
The official entry to the castle grounds (there are many ways to get in) is from the Hradčanské Náměstí (Castle Square) at the west end of the castle grounds. A gateway with statues of fighting giants, called Battling Titans by Ignác Platzer, and built in the the 18th century, leads to the small Grand (or First) Castle Courtyard and Matyášova Brána (Matthias Gate), which is behind the statue on the left.
The Matthias Gateway was built in 1614 and leads to the Second Castle Courtyard below. The rounded building on the right is Kaple sv Kříže (Chapel of the Holy Cross) with St. Vitus's Cathedral in the background.
The third courtyard, The Third Castle Courtyard, below was once the hub of the fortress' activity. In here was the Cathedral, the Old Provostship (headquarters for the royal guards), and the Royal Palace. I wonder who got to clean all of those windows?
I sat down on the bench next to the building entrance with the flag over it in the picture above and tried to take pictures of the dark building on the right side of the picture above. Below is the result. This is two pictures stitched together vertically of the Great South Tower of St. Vitus's Cathedral. I couldn't get back far enough to get the whole thing in one shot. The stitching didn't go all that well. There is some barrel distortion from the camera's lens, and some things that didn't line up quite right, but you get the idea. It's big. The tower is 96 meters tall. While work on the cathedral began in the 1300's it was actually not consecrated until 1929! You'll notice that there are two clock faces. The upper one indicates the hour, and the lower one the minutes.
Around the building to the left in the picture above was the front of the cathedral, below, which faced west. The detail of the images of the stained glass window depict the creation of the universe. I didn't get any pictures of that, because I didn't go in. It was beginning to get too late, and my feet were starting to hurt.
2018-03-06