Golden Lane

Golden Lane — Zlatá ulička in Czech — is a single row of tiny houses tucked against the northern wall of Prague Castle, so small that a tall visitor has to stoop at many of the doorways. It began in the late sixteenth century: in 1597 Emperor Rudolf II allowed the castle marksmen, who guarded the fortifications, to build rooms into the arches of the wall, and the dwellings grew out of those recesses. At one time there were houses on both sides of the lane; the opposite row was pulled down in the nineteenth century, leaving the one-sided street that survives today.

The name has attracted a romantic legend that Rudolf's alchemists laboured here to turn base metal into gold. Nothing confirms it, and Czech historians regard the tale as very unlikely for such a poor corner of the castle. The more sober explanation is that goldsmiths lived in the lane in the seventeenth century; others suggest the name came from the gold braid on the guards' uniforms. What the houses really record is centuries of humble life inside the walls of a royal seat: craftsmen, soldiers, poor tenants and, in the twentieth century, writers.

Franz Kafka worked in house No. 22, which his sister Ottla rented, from November 1916 to March 1917, and wrote much of the stories collected in A Country Doctor there. The future Nobel laureate Jaroslav Seifert lived in the lane in 1929, and poets including František Halas and Vítězslav Nezval met in house No. 12. At No. 14 lived the fortune-teller Matylda Průšová, known as Madame de Thèbes, before the Second World War. The lane's present look dates from the reconstruction completed in 1955 under the architect Pavel Janák, when the artist and animator Jiří Trnka devised the pastel colours — each front a different shade of ochre, green, blue or rose — that make the row look like a set of painted toys.

Today some houses are furnished as interiors from different periods, seen through glass, and others are small shops. Above them runs a wooden gallery inside the wall with a display of armour, and the lane ends at Daliborka, the round fifteenth-century tower that served as a prison and took its name from its first inmate, the knight Dalibor of Kozojedy. The best moments are early or late in the day, when the crowds thin and the low doors, chimneys and tiled roofs can be seen as what they were: a village's worth of lives squeezed into the thickness of a castle wall.

Getting there

Golden Lane is inside the Prague Castle complex in Hradčany, Prague, a short distance from the Dejvice district (about 1.4 km). Václav Havel Airport Prague (PRG) is about 10 km away. Tram 22 stops at Pražský hrad, from where the castle courtyards lead to the lane; from Malostranská metro station (line A) the Old Castle Stairs climb up to the eastern end of the castle.