Charles Bridge

The first stone crossing of the Vltava at Prague was built under Vladislav II, finished in 1172 and named for his queen, Judith. Ice and floodwater destroyed it on 3 February 1342.

The chronicler Beneš Krabice of Veitmile records only that in 1357 the emperor laid the first stone of the new bridge on the bank near the monastery of St Clement. The founding moment of 9 July 1357 at 5.31, a palindrome of odd numbers, appears in no medieval record: the astronomer Zdeněk Horský proposed it in 1979, and the chronicler Prokop Lupáč gives 9 July 1358. The plans were probably drawn by Matthias of Arras; Peter Parler was long named as the builder, though a 2007 hypothesis puts forward the Prague mason Oto, called Otlin.

The sixteen arches rest on piers sunk 2.4 metres below the riverbed on oak piles weighted with millstone-shaped blocks. The cost drained the Bohemian treasury badly enough for collections to be taken in churches; the opening is generally dated 1402.

In 1393 Wenceslaus IV had the body of the tortured vicar-general John of Nepomuk thrown from the bridge into the Vltava; a metal cross in the parapet marks where this is said to have happened. A year after the Battle of White Mountain the 27 leaders of the anti-Habsburg revolt were executed on 21 June 1621, and their severed heads were displayed on the Old Town Bridge Tower to deter Czechs from further resistance. At the close of the Thirty Years' War in 1648 the Swedes held the west bank, and the heaviest fighting of their attempt on the Old Town took place on the bridge; the river side of the Old Town tower was so badly damaged that the remnants of almost all its Gothic decoration had to be removed.

The statue of John of Nepomuk, raised in 1693 in memory of his fall, was the first of the Baroque figures. Donors paid for the rest, and between 1707 and 1714 the remaining piers were filled, among them Matthias Bernard Braun's St Luitgard and a run of works by Ferdinand Maxmilián Brokoff.

A toll was charged for crossing until 1816. Both ends were built up with shops where smoked-meat sellers, comb-makers and cake-sellers traded, the last cleared away in 1828. It carried the royal route of the Bohemian coronations and was the only way over the Vltava at Prague until 1841; that link made Prague a fixture on the trade roads between east and west.

In February 1784 torn-loose rafts and ice jammed the arches and the water undermined the piers; the front head of the pier carrying the military guardhouse fell and several more were badly damaged. The engineer Franz Herget and František Traxal directed the repair.

The flood of September 1890 was worse. Logs from broken-up rafts piled against the piers as the river rose by 2.5 to 3 metres, and at half past five on the morning of 4 September the arches gave way, taking two of Brokoff's statues, St Ignatius of Loyola and St Francis Xavier, into the water. Josef Hlávka and the Vienna professor Franz von Rziha designed the repair, the new piers founded on iron caissons. It reopened on 19 November 1892 at a cost of 665,000 crowns.

A horse tram ran over the bridge from 1883 and an electric tram from 1905, fed by contacts set into the roadway rather than overhead wires, a system chosen by František Křižík so that a catenary would not spoil the bridge. The service stayed unreliable and the trams damaged the structure, so tram running stopped in 1908; buses followed, and public transport continued until the Second World War. Motor traffic ended in 1965, and the general repair of 1965-1978, costing about 50 million crowns, left the span to pedestrians alone.

Repair of the upper structure began on 20 August 2007 and was signed off on 12 November 2010. The heritage inspectorate reported in November 2008 that far more stone had been discarded than the diagnostic survey had identified, and in 2010 UNESCO's World Heritage Committee stated that "the restoration of Charles Bridge was carried out without adequate conservation advice on materials and techniques".

The bridge is a national cultural monument of the Czech Republic, and its Baroque sculptures have been replaced by copies, the originals held mainly in the Lapidarium and administered by the National Heritage Institute. Since 1990 the artists, photographers and musicians who work on the bridge have been chosen by the Association of Charles Bridge Artists, allotted the space by tender; a further twenty-year programme of inspection and repair, budgeted at 45-60 million crowns, began in late 2019.