What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 15 February 2023.

Hostivítova was built in 1891.

See https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/08/20/prague-2-day-83-nezamyslova/ for a discussion of how Kosmas claimed there were seven legendary princes of Bohemia between Přemysl (yesterday’s thread) and Bořivoj (who actually existed).

Hostivít was number seven, and is therefore assumed to be Bořivoj’s father. If he existed, we can deduce that he must have ruled before 872 or so. We can also assume that his own father was called Neklan.

However, Kosmas didn’t write all that much about Hostivít, other than that he and Slavibor arranged the marriage between Bořivoj and Ludmila (Slavibor’s daughter) when she was born. There’s also a brief mention of a brother, Děpolt.

As with Nezamsyl, Hostivít’s name is of interest. One theory is that the dukes were named in relation to days of the week. We saw that Nezamysl, the first in the series, can be linked to Sunday.

Which logically means that Hostivít, Duke Number Seven, is related to Saturday – and, apparently, Saturday was the day on which you would welcome guests (vítání hostů in modern Czech).