What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 8 September 2023.

So this should be a brief one: ‘Ke Hradu’ means ‘Towards the Castle’, which is exactly where this street leads (depending which direction you’re going in, obvs).

One achievement of the street was to make the Royal Route, i.e. the journey that kings had to travel on the way to their coronation, from their court in the Old Town to the Castle, a little bit shorter.

Úvoz and Pohořelec, part of the Royal Route ever since it was first travelled in 1438, could now be bypassed.

The street can get remarkably crowded during carnival time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Ke_Hradu_(Prague)#/media/File:Prague_Carnival_Feb_2013.JPG

It also has a Starbucks with about eight billion stairs before you reach the toilets, and if you want to judge me for getting a coffee there (not in the toilets), you try taking pics for this series for six hours on a day when there’s a torrential rainstorm every ten minutes.

But what’s outside the Starbucks is actually pretty interesting: sloup Panny Marie Einsiedelnské, or the column of Our Lady of Einsiedeln.

It includes a statue of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus in her lap. We know roughly when it was created (1672), but we don’t know by whom.

The Starbucks used to be the site of a chapel, also dedicated to Our Lady of Einsiedeln, and closed down in 1783 because, yes, Joseph II and his reforms.