The palace is three buildings stacked on each other. At the bottom is the Romanesque palace of Prince Soběslav I, about 1135. Above that sits the Gothic palace of Charles IV and Wenceslas IV. On top, and open to visitors, is the late-Gothic royal floor of Vladislav II Jagiello.
Vladislav Hall (1493–1502) is the reason to come. Benedikt Ried roofed a room 62 m long, 16 m wide and 13 m high without a single internal column, using ribs that curve, cross and loop free of the structure they pretend to support — decorative rib vaulting pushed as far as it ever went. Look up first, then at the windows: they are square-headed and Renaissance, among the earliest Renaissance detailing north of the Alps, sitting inside a Gothic hall. The room served for coronation feasts, for markets in the arcades, and for tournaments held under the roof; Czech presidents are still sworn in here.
The Riders’ Staircase on the north side is the specific thing to look for. It has a twisted, folded vault and steps deliberately made low and deep, because knights rode up it on horseback to enter the hall for the tournaments. Go down it, not up, and you will see the vault properly.
Off the hall are the Bohemian Chancellery, where two royal governors and a secretary were thrown out of the window on 23 May 1618 and survived the fall — the Second Defenestration that started the Thirty Years’ War — and the Land Rolls Room, whose ceiling and walls are painted with the coats of arms of the clerks who kept the registers of Bohemian estates. All Saints Chapel adjoins the east end.
Under the palace, on a separate ticket, the Story of Prague Castle exhibition uses the Romanesque and Gothic cellars for the castle’s archaeology: graves, weapons, the tomb goods of Přemyslid princes.
