What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 28 November 2023.

The verb ujezdit means to ride on something until it’s smooth – i.e. to plough (although the more common verbs for ‘to plough’ are orat and kypřit).

An újezd is, therefore, land which can be ploughed or cultivated – and, in the 12th century, it was the name of a village around here.

A text from 1365 refers to a village church, that of John the Evangelist (who is credited with writing the Gospel of John), but we don’t know exactly where this was, and, like another eight million churches I’ve written about, it was destroyed by the Hussites in the 1420s.

It was also in the 1360s that Újezd became part of the ever-expanding Malá Strana.

Around this time, a gate was built on the border with Smíchov. It was called the Cartesian Gate after a nearby monastery.

This was replaced twice – first, by the Imperial Gate in 1693, and then in 1862 by the Újezd Gate. However, the latter only lasted for 29 years – when the city walls were destroyed in 1891, the gate was too.

Here it is in 1890.

Újezd (the street), meanwhile, used to have two names from 1800 to 1870: the northern part was called Újezdská, and the southern part was U brány Újezdské, named after the gate.

Also in the ‘not here anymore’ category are the Újezd barracks, built in 1712 and and destroyed in 1932 (replaced by a park – not every loss makes things uglier).

Here they are in 1912, and here’s the replacement looking particularly wonderful in autumn 2023.

The barracks are possibly best known as the birthplace of Jan Neruda (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/09/08/prague-1-day-37-nerudova/).

Still in existence just over the round, however, is Tyršův dům (AKA Tyršák), the seat of the Czech Sokol Association. For a quick guide to the Sokols, see https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/08/26/prague-2-day-114-sokolska/; for Mr Tyrš, see https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/08/31/prague-2-day-132-tyrsova/).

Tyršák, while looking unlike any gym you might know, actually includes four of them, as well as Prague’s oldest indoor swimming pool.

Finally, Újezd includes the workshop that Czech photographer Josef Sudek used for almost fifty years until his death in 1976.

It hosts the sort of exhibitions that I would gladly go to for the rest of my life: https://atelierjosefasudka.cz/en