What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 1 November 2023. Street name translates as ‘By the Iron Bridge’.

Before 1868, Prague only had two bridges across the Vltava. Other than the very famous one which is still there, there was the Emperor Francis I Bridge, which isn’t. It was built in 1841, and replaced in 1898 (there’ll be a post about its replacement).

In the late 1860s, two more bridges would join them: Emperor Francis Joseph I Bridge (also gone, and coming up in a later post), and Rudolf’s Footbridge / Rudolfova lávka, which started at Klárov, where this street is now.

The Rudolf in question was Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria, born in 1858 as the eldest son of Franz Joseph I and the Empress Siri, and, therefore, heir to the Habsburg throne. Appropriately, at the other end of the bridge, the Rudolfinum would open in 1885.

The bridge was in use until 1914, when it was replaced by POST TRUNCATED SO AS TO NOT MAKE TOMORROW’S POST REDUNDANT

Here are two wonderful pictures showing how the bridge looked.

Sadly, Rudolf himself would mainly come to be known for his presumed murder-suicide pact with his mistress, Baroness Mary Vetsera, at the Mayerling hunting lodge in 1889, when he was 30, and she was just 17.