Prague

Prague as we know it is surprisingly young. Can you believe that most people consider the current Prague to be less than 250 years old? Mind-blowing, right? How is that even possible?
You might think that something is fishy here since you probably remember that some of the most famous landmarks in Praga are actually way older than that. After all, Charles Bridge was built around 1357! That’s when the namesake of the bridge, Emperor Charles IV, was alive! The Josefov, Jewish district where famous writer Franz Kafka was born, is supposedly 1000 years old. The Vyšehrad, Petřín Hill, Town Halls…all of them are so much older than 250 years! We must be mistaken, right? Prague must be much older than that!
Well, the answer is that while it is true that all these things are indeed that old, they were not part of the same city initially! You see, until 1784, what we know today as Prague was actually five different cities! Malá Strana, Nové Město, Staré Město, Hradčany, and Josefov were combined into a single mega-city. This is why you might see distinct differences between architecture styles in these districts, and why Prague has so many Town Halls!