What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 2 May 2024.

According to Christianity, Joachim lived from about 100-75 BC to about 10 BC, i.e. not quite long enough to become the world’s braggiest grandparent, because his daughter was Mary, and his grandson was, therefore, Jesus.

Among the more well-known variants of his name, we have Joaquín (Spanish), Gioacchino (Italian), Aćim (Serbian), and Joaquim (Portuguese). In Czech, the name is written as Jáchym.

That said, we don’t know who Jáchym of ‘this street’ fame was. It’s assumed that he was Jewish, and that he owned one of the houses here.

Before the 20th century, the names ‘Joachimova’ and ‘Joachimská’ were in use.

Jáchymova’s most famous building is the Talmud-Torah School at number 3. It operated as a Jewish religious school from 1905 to 1942.

Nowadays, it hosts the Terezín Initiative, an association of former prisoners of the Terezín and Łódź ghettos, as well as the Czech office of the Jewish National Fund.

Back to Joachim: his wife was St Anne, who, unlike her husband, actually *is* the source of a Prague 1 street name: https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/10/03/prague-1-day-163-anenske-namesti/.