Prague – Cynthia Paces (2026)

This sweeping and comprehensive history of Prague traces the city from its origins in the ninth century to the present day, exploring its past as a political center and as a city on the periphery of empires. Poets have called Prague the City of One Hundred Spires, Golden Prague, Magic Prague, and the Mother of Cities. Millions of tourists visit the Czech capital each year, drawn by its blend of architectural styles and dramatic landscape, from St. Vitus’s Gothic cathedral above Charles Bridge and the Vltava River to winding Gothic alleys, Renaissance palaces, Baroque statues, and modern glass structures. Yet the city’s beauty often obscures centuries of ethnic and religious conflict. In Prague’s Jewish Quarter, the names of nearly 80,000 Holocaust victims inscribed on the walls of Pinkas Synagogue bear witness to its complex and violent past. Cynthia Paces traces eleven centuries of political, cultural, and social development, from the first church and fortifications built by Slavic dukes on the castle hill to the transformations brought by Charles IV and Rudolph II, religious conflict, the defenestrations of Prague, and the Thirty Years War. She also examines Prague’s twentieth-century experience of democracy, antisemitism, Nazi occupation, and communist repression, while illuminating the lives and contributions of its artists, architects, musicians, writers, Jewish community, German and Czech speakers, and European artisans, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Antonin Dvorak, Oskar Kokoschka, Elizabeth Weston, John Dee, and Franz Kafka.