St. Vitus Cathedral

The present cathedral is the third church on the site, all three dedicated to St Vitus. The first was an early Romanesque rotunda founded by Duke Wenceslaus I of Bohemia in about 929 or 930, set on the raised acropolis of the Prague castle site and the third church there after those of the Virgin Mary and St George. The patron was chosen because Wenceslaus had obtained a relic, the saint's arm, from Henry I, duke of Saxony and king of the East Franks; it is also possible that he wanted a saint whose Czech name, Svatý Vít, sounds much like that of the Slavic solar deity Svantevit, the easier to convert his subjects. Not long after the founder's death his remains were laid in the church, and with that the cult of St Wenceslas began. In 973 it became the seat of the newly created bishopric of Prague, and after Břetislav I's expedition to Gniezno in 1038 the seized relics of St Adalbert, the second bishop of Prague, were brought there, completing the three saints to whom the church has been dedicated ever since. A Christian population and a shrinking pagan one lived side by side in the castle at least until the eleventh century.

In 1060 Prince Spytihněv II set about a more spacious church, the rotunda having become too small for the faithful, and the chronicler Cosmas dates the start of work to St Wenceslas's feast day that year. Spytihněv died shortly afterwards and his brother Vratislav II, who became the first Czech king, carried the work on and set out the ground plan himself. The result was a triple-aisled Romanesque basilica on a cross-shaped plan, seventy metres long, with two choirs and a pair of towers, its design nodding to the abbey church at Hildesheim and to Speyer Cathedral. The southern apse of the rotunda was taken into the eastern transept of the new church because it held the tomb of St Wenceslas, by then patron saint of the Czech princes, and a bishop's mansion was built to the south, much enlarged in the mid twelfth century. Fire struck the finished building in 1091 and it was completed for good in 1096. From the basilica onward a tradition held that where the sainted Wenceslas lay buried, Czech kings should not only be crowned but buried too. Richly carved columns of the western and eastern crypts survive under the southern part of the present cathedral.

On 30 April 1344 Prague was raised to an archbishopric and taken out of obedience to the archbishop of Mainz, and six days later a papal bull gave the Prague archbishop, Arnošt of Pardubice, the right to crown the Czech king. On 21 November 1344 John of Bohemia laid the foundation stone of the new cathedral, with two of the king's sons, Charles IV and John Henry, present, and Arnošt wearing the archiepiscopal pallium before a great gathering of prelates and noblemen while the choir sang Te Deum laudamus. The patrons were the cathedral chapter under its dean, Arnošt himself and, above all, Charles IV, king of Bohemia and soon to be Holy Roman Emperor, who intended the building to be a coronation church, a family crypt, a treasury for the kingdom's most precious relics, and the last resting place and pilgrimage site of the patron saint Wenceslas.

The first master builder was the Frenchman Matthias of Arras, summoned from the Papal Palace at Avignon and by then fifty-five. His design was in essence an import of French Gothic, its slender verticality and strict proportions closest to Rodez Cathedral. He began at the eastern choir so that mass could be said there as soon as possible, laid out eight chapels of matching plan around the horseshoe choir, carried the choir up to the triforium, and began the Chapel of the Holy Cross on the south side and the sacristy on the north. He died in 1352, having lived to build only the easternmost parts, the arcades and the ambulatory.

From 1356 the work passed to Peter Parler, then about twenty-three, born in Schwäbisch Gmünd and son of the architect of the Heilig-Kreuz-Münster there, who came to Prague with a notable building family behind him. He first finished what Matthias had left, the sacristy on the north of the choir and the chapel on the south, and then built to his own ideas. His net vaults have double diagonal ribs spanning the width of the choir bay, which both strengthens the vault and runs a zigzag pattern the length of the church. Where Matthias had been schooled as a geometer, Parler was trained as a sculptor and woodcarver and handled architecture almost as sculpture, giving no two of his windows the same tracery. Twenty-one busts on the triforium show the royal family, saints, bishops of Prague and the two master builders, Parler among them. He raised the Chapel of St Wenceslas over the saint's grave with a star vault of a kind not seen before; the chapel was consecrated in 1367 and its decoration finished by 1373, the lower walls set with more than 1,300 semi-precious stones and painted with the Passion of Christ. The polychrome statue of Wenceslas above the altar dates from the 1370s, is attributed to Parler or to his nephew Jindřich, and is the oldest surviving free-standing statue of the saint. By 1368 the south porch stood beside the chapel with the Crown Chamber above it, reached by a door with seven locks and holding the Bohemian crown jewels. Parler also founded the great bell tower, and the choir was vaulted and finished in 1385.

Work went slowly because the Emperor gave Parler many other commissions, among them the new Charles Bridge and churches across the Czech realm, and at his death only the choir and parts of the transept were finished. His sons Wenzel and above all Johannes Parler continued, followed by a Master Petrilk, by all accounts also of the Parler workshop, and under the three of them the transept and the great tower on its south side were completed, the tower reaching fifty-five metres, along with the gable joining tower and south transept. That gable is nicknamed the Golden Gate, most likely for the golden mosaic of the Last Judgment on it, made between 1370 and 1372, in which Charles IV and his fourth wife Elizabeth of Pomerania kneel below six Bohemian patrons; it was through this portal that kings entered for their coronation. A stone tablet of 1394 set in the lower part of the tower records the progress of the medieval work. The Hussite War in the first half of the fifteenth century stopped everything: it ended a workshop that had run almost a century, and dozens of pictures and sculptures suffered from Hussite iconoclasm. Interest among Parler's successors had already fallen away, and his sons boarded up the site with a plank wall and closed off the fragment of the church; it stayed a torso until 1929.

For most of the following centuries it stood half-built, carried as far as the great tower and a transept closed by a provisional wall, with a timber-roofed structure standing where the nave was to go and services held there separately from the choir. Under Vladislav II Jagiellon the late Gothic royal oratory was built, its design attributed to Benedikt Ried and its execution to Hans Spiess, joined to the Old Royal Palace by a covered bridge; the king also set the work of completion going, but it was cut short almost at once for want of funds. The great fire of 1541 damaged the cathedral heavily, destroyed all the castle bells and clock cymbals and burned out much of the Castle and Malá Strana; in the repairs of 1556 to 1561 the western Wohlmut gallery was built to close off the unfinished church, and it was taken down and moved to the north transept when the building was finally completed. The Zikmund bell was cast in 1549 by Tomáš Jaroš of Brno on the order of Ferdinand I, replacing an older bell of the same name of 1477; at about 13.5 tonnes and 2.56 metres across it is the largest Czech bell. Between 1506 and 1509 the Master of the Litoměřice Altarpiece painted the life of St Wenceslas on the upper walls of his chapel.

After the coronation of Frederick of the Palatinate as king of Bohemia on 27 and 28 December 1619, the altars with their paintings and sculptures were largely broken up on the orders of the Calvinist preacher Scultetus. The Renaissance mausoleum of Maximilian II, Ferdinand I and his wife Anna Jagiellon, by Alexander Collin, was finished in 1589 and stands above the crypt where Bohemian kings and queens lie. A tale recorded by the canon Tomáš Pešina z Čechorodu held that once St Vitus was completed it would match the glory of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, and Emperor Leopold I laid a foundation stone for the completion during his visit to Prague in 1673 and had money released for it, but the building was never begun. The silver tomb of St John of Nepomuk in the south ambulatory dates from 1736 and follows a design by Fischer von Erlach. The Prussian bombardment of 1757 destroyed the Renaissance organ, and the south tower was given a Baroque spire designed by Nikolaus Pacassi, with the copper cap under which the bells hang dating from 1770.

In 1844 Václav Pešina, an energetic canon of St Vitus, and the neo-Gothic architect Josef Kranner put a programme for the repair and completion of the cathedral to a gathering of German architects in Prague, and in the same year the Union for Completion of the Cathedral of St Vitus in Prague was formed to repair and finish the building and rid it of everything mutilated and stylistically inimical to it. Kranner led the work from 1861 to 1866, chiefly repairs, the removal of Baroque decoration judged unnecessary and the restoration of the interior. In 1870 the foundations of the new nave were finally laid, and after Kranner's death Josef Mocker took charge, his appointment confirmed on 17 May 1873. He designed the west front in a classic Gothic manner with two towers, and after his death on 16 January 1899 the third and last architect of the restoration, Kamil Hilbert, kept that design and built the two western towers, the nave and the transept. During Hilbert's work archaeological excavations uncovered parts of the cathedral's predecessors, the Romanesque basilica and the pre-Romanesque rotunda.

In the 1920s the sculptor Vojtěch Sucharda worked on the façade and the Art Nouveau painter Alfons Mucha decorated the new windows in the north part of the nave; František Kysela designed the rose window between 1925 and 1927, showing scenes from the Biblical story of creation. Antonín Zápotocký, later president of Czechoslovakia, worked on the neo-Gothic completion as a trained stonemason. The finished cathedral was consecrated on 12 May 1929 as part of the celebrations of the thousandth anniversary of St Wenceslas's death and handed over to the public on 28 September that year, the September ceremony attended by President Masaryk and Archbishop František Kordač. The building had taken nearly six hundred years from the laying of its foundation stone, and although the whole western half is a neo-Gothic addition, much of Parler's design and detailing was carried into it.

Between 1934 and 1935 the architect Kamil Roškot remodelled the tomb of the Bohemian kings in the crypt, with the sculptor Ladislav Kofránek working on the coats of arms; among those buried in the cathedral are Charles IV, his first wife Blanche of Valois, Wenceslas IV, George of Poděbrady, Ferdinand I, Maximilian II and Rudolf II. In the 1950s the south porch was repaired with new doors to a design by the architect Jan Sokol. After 1985 the cathedral was closed completely for three years, to visitors, services and worshippers alike, for repairs and work on the interior. The funeral of Cardinal František Tomášek was held there on 12 August 1992, the state funeral of Václav Havel in December 2011, the first state funeral since 1875, and Cardinal Miloslav Vlk was buried in the New Archbishop's Chapel on 25 March 2017. By a decree of Cardinal Vlk of 23 April 1997, on the thousandth anniversary of the death of St Adalbert, the church was rededicated to Saints Vitus, Wenceslaus and Adalbert, the triple patrocinium the Romanesque basilica had carried since Adalbert's relics were brought there in 1038.

The church administered the cathedral until 1954, when a government decree of the communist administration declared the Czechoslovak people the owner of the whole Prague Castle complex and the President's Office its administrator. From 1992 organisations founded by the church filed suit to establish who actually owned the building. After fourteen years, on 16 June 2006, the court held that the 1954 decree had not changed the ownership and that the cathedral belonged to the Metropolitan Chapter at St Vitus, and in September 2006 the Prague Castle Administration handed it over to the chapter. On 16 February 2007 the Supreme Court set that judgment aside, holding the 1954 decree still valid, and the case went back to the district court, which on 27 September 2007 ruled that the cathedral remains the property of the Czech state. The City Court in Prague confirmed it, the Supreme Court rejected the church's appeal on 5 March 2009, and the Constitutional Court rejected a further appeal while noting that the chapter unquestionably owns the interior furnishings. The chapter considered taking the case to the European Court of Human Rights, but on 24 May 2010 the new Archbishop of Prague, Dominik Duka, and President Václav Klaus agreed not to continue the litigation and set up a board made of the seven traditional holders of the keys to the Wenceslas Chamber to coordinate the administration and use of the cathedral. In July 2012 the Chamber of Deputies passed a bill compensating the churches for property seized by the communist government; the Senate approved it in November 2012 and the government implemented it the following June.

The cathedral is the seat of the Archbishop of Prague and the largest church in the country, and it is protected as part of a national cultural heritage site in the Czech Republic. It is administered jointly: the Prague Castle Administration owns the building and runs the visitor operation and the repair and restoration work, while the Metropolitan Chapter owns the furnishings and, through the parish it runs, the liturgical life of the church. The main organ was built by Josef Melzel between 1929 and 1931 and overhauled by the organ builders Brachtl a Kánský from 1999 to 2001. A new instrument by the Spanish workshop of Gerhard Grenzing, with 122 stops and 5,755 pipes and costing about 160 million Czech crowns, was completed and brought into use in June 2026 and inaugurated on 15 June, the feast day of St Vitus; its 180 crystal ornaments were designed by Peter Olah.