Happy Birthday, Prague’s Charles Bridge

Prague’s landmark Charles Bridge, one of Europe’s most arresting sights, turned 650 years old this week. The Prague Post covered the city’s elaborate festivities and recounted a little bridge history: “According to legend, King Charles IV, later to become Holy Roman Emperor, laid the foundation at 5:31 a.m. July 9, 1357, after consulting astrologers to come up with the palindromic time and date sequence of 1357-9-7-531.”  A Charles Bridge webcam shows plenty of people out enjoying the bridge today. I dialed up World Hum contributor David Farley, who lived in Prague for three years and edited Travelers’ Tales Prague and ask him about his memories of the bridge.

In addition to pointing out the legend that eggs were mixed into the mortar during the bridge’s construction, here’s what he told me:

Going back to visit the city, I would often find myself on the Old Town side and walking toward Mala Strana, the old neigborhood where they film all the movies. I would be with some Czech friends and would always say, “We gotta walk across the bridge, we gotta walk across the bridge.” They would just sigh, because of course there are so many tourists on it. But they loved it.

The best time to walk on the bridge, by the way, is at night, when the castle is all lit up. Everything below the castle is dark and the castle looks like it’s floating there.

Photo by martin the blind via Flickr, (Creative Commons).

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