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Updated: May 20, 2025
We have noticed the site, and that it is admirably adapted to defence, a rocky eminence rising like a promontory above the broad Vltava, its steep sides falling down to the river on the eastern side, and to deep-cut valleys to north and south. The position offers a wide view over the rolling plains to westward.
There is a spot in the forest, thirty stades from this village which the River Vltava encircles, and which to the north the stream Brusnice secures by its deep valley; and to the south a hill, which from its rocks takes the name Petřin, towers above it.
Strange scenes must have been reflected in the Vltava in those stormy times, as the pageant of the history of Prague crossed the Charles Bridge. One day, to the beating of drums, a bevy of priests came from afar; they made for the market-place and there sold indulgences. The Pragers, distracted by the dissensions that rent the country, took to arms repeatedly.
George on the Hradšany dates back to this early period; you can see its two rather stunted white steeples standing out over the complex of buildings near the eastern point of the Castle Hill before it dips down towards the Vltava. The earliest church on this point is attributed to Vratislav, uncle of St. Wenceslaus, but this sounds rather doubtful.
Charles may have thought all this very beautiful but unlikely to last. He saw clouds arising, and they closed over Bohemia when he died. Of the works that Charles constructed for the beautifying of his capital, several are reflected in the waters of Vltava. There is, for instance, the bridgehead tower on the Mala Strana side, a graceful monument to Charles's gracious days.
Vyšehrad is about the first striking view you obtain of Prague as the train de luxe brings you round a bend before crossing the railway bridge over the Vltava. Travellers seeing Prague for the first time are apt to mistake this hill of Vyšehrad for the castle. I did so myself; my delight, therefore, at the first sight of Prague's crowning glory, the Hradšany, was all the greater.
And here in Prague, looking down over my newspaper from the terrace of my choice, I seemed to see the spires of the city mass closer together and take on the form of giant jungle trees, the broad Vltava to shrink to the narrow silver thread of a mountain stream at the crossing of which Wun Thu's sporting warriors had levelled their blunderbusses lashed to trees and warranted harmless to all but the men behind them; the paper told of another rising led by Wun Thu.
So Charles threw this bridge across the water, a lasting, glorious monument to a father ever careful of his children's welfare, and its stout pillars and graceful arches bid fair to call up reflections for yet further centuries on the face of Bohemia's own river, the Vltava. The River Vltava rises away down in the south among the mountains of the Bohemian Forest.
Here again, on this island, you may dine and drink and listen to good music. You may also shoot at glass balls with an air-gun. Ichabod! Wherever there is a good navigable river, there you have many occasions for excursions. Steamers of all sizes, painted in the national colours of Bohemia, white and red, ply up and down the Vltava.
I have often wondered how and where people crossed the Vltava previous to 1167 when Judith, Queen of Vladislav II, built a bridge very near the site of the present Charles Bridge.
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