St Vitus Cathedral

← Encyclopedia

St Vitus Cathedral is the Gothic metropolitan cathedral of Prague, raised inside the walls of Prague Castle on the hill above the Vltava. It is the coronation church and burial place of the kings of Bohemia, the keeper of the Bohemian crown jewels, and the seat of the archbishop — the religious centre of a kingdom and, for a stretch of the late Middle Ages and again around 1600, of an empire.

The building has two histories separated by five centuries. Charles IV laid the foundation in 1344, the year Prague was raised to an archbishopric, and brought in Matthias of Arras and then the young Peter Parler, whose net-vaults and inventive tracery made the choir one of the boldest pieces of architecture north of the Alps. Work faltered after the Hussite wars and stopped for generations, leaving the cathedral a torso with a finished east end and a bare stub of nave. Only in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the western half completed in matching Gothic, the whole consecrated in 1929 — which is why a medieval cathedral carries, in its newer windows and porches, the hand of the modern Czech revival.

At its core stands the Chapel of St Wenceslas, built by Parler over the grave of the tenth-century duke who became the patron saint of the Czech lands. Its lower walls are encrusted with polished semi-precious stones set into gilded plaster, and a small door behind the altar leads to the chamber where the coronation regalia are kept under seven locks. The chapel is the devotional knot of the building: saint, dynasty, and nation gathered in one room.

The cathedral’s place in esoteric history is a matter of geography rather than doctrine. It sits within the castle precinct that Rudolf II made his capital in the decades around 1600, and Rudolf’s Prague drew alchemists, astrologers, and natural philosophers from across Europe — among them John Dee and Edward Kelley, and the astronomers Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler. The emperor’s patronage, half scientific and half occult, fixed Prague in later imagination as the alchemical city, and the cathedral is the great fixed point above the streets where that reputation was made. The link is real and worth noting; it should not be overstated, since the church itself was a working seat of Latin Christianity throughout, not a temple of the art Rudolf collected below it.

The fabric records the long argument between the medieval and the modern that runs through Czech history. Its Gothic east end is six hundred years old; its mosaics have been restored more than once; its great south tower carries a Renaissance gallery and a Baroque cap above Parler’s stone. The cathedral was begun for one idea of sacred kingship and finished under another idea of nationhood, and it holds both.

→ Related: St Stephen S Cathedral · Reims Cathedral · Middle Ages