Pod Pekařkou is, yes, beneath said farmstead (and is about 35-40 years older than Nad Pekařkou. The perils of covering these streets in an order determined purely by which one you end up walking down first).
Type ‘hláska’ into most translation tools, and they’ll start telling you about a phone. However, they’re not talking about a telephone – in this sense, a ‘phone’ is any distinct speech sound. As in phonetics, phonemes, homophones, and so on.
However, a ‘hláska’ is also a watchtower, usually found as part of the fortifications of a medieval town. It can also be used to describe a traffic control station on a railway line, or, when called an ‘SOS hláska’, it’s an emergency (public) telephone).
Here’s a picture I took from a, erm, Great watchtower in February of this year.
There’s a house at the top of this street (back in Podolí, not Beijing) that overlooks the surrounding valley – hence the area once being known as Hláska, and this street leading to the watchtower (Ke Hlásce).
‘Terasovitá’ can be translated as ‘terraced’ or ‘tiered’.
And the residences in the street, built in the 1960s and 1970s, have some quite pleasing (and quite southern European-looking?) terraces, as best evidenced by https://pamatkovykatalog.cz/terasove-domy-20605427.
But it won’t be long before a significant addition to the things named after Dvorce – Dvorecký most is the name of the bridge being built across the Vltava between Podolí and the border of Hlubočepy and Smíchov in Prague 5: https://ekonomickydenik.cz/most-za-miliardu-je-vcelku/.
Jeremenkova has exited in its current form since 1952; before then, it consisted of two separate streets called Dvorecká (built 1906) and Pod vrstami (created 1938).
More on those in future posts, as there are still streets with those names.
Andrei Ivanovich Yeremenko was born to a peasant family in Markivka, near Kharkiv, in 1892.
Joining the Russian Imperial Army in 1913, he spent WW1, until the Bolshevik Revolution, fighting in the Carpathians and Galicia.
Joining the Red Army in 1918, he fought in the Russian Civil War and the Polish-Soviet War.
When World War II started, he participated in the occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939, then, in 1940, took part in the occupation of Lithuania before being transferred to Eastern Siberia.
He was there when Operation Barbarossa started in June 1941; he was recalled to Moscow and made acting commander of the Soviet Western Front.
After a period of convalescence from an injury, he was assigned to lead the Stalingrad Front, later the Southern Front, in August 1942. In 1943, he participated in the Smolensk offensive, and, in 1944, commanded forces during the liberation of Crimea.
1944 would also see Yeremenko being sent to the Baltic, where his 2nd Baltic Front managed to capture Riga.
In March 1945, Yeremenko was assigned to command the 4th Ukrainian Front. After helping to capture the part of Hungary that was still occupied by Germany, Yeremenko’s men helped liberate many towns in Czechoslovakia, most famously Ostrava.
Believe me, I’d rather be reading about someone other than a Soviet general right now too, and would like there to be a few more streets named after locals who helped liberate Prague.
In 1547, they were confiscated by Emperor Ferdinand I and given to the Granovský family. They changed hands several times over the centuries, until serfdom was abolished in 1848; a couple of years later, Dvorce became part of Podolí (https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2025/07/11/prague-4-day-141-podolska/).
Until 1947 (with the inevitable break during the Nazi occupation), the street was called Riegrova, as in the early leader of the Czech nationalist movement, František Ladislav Rieger (1818-1903), who’s also given his name to that park in Vinohrady.
Kublov, meanwhile, was the name of a settlement round here, though not one there’s a tremendous amount of information online about, although this lovely piece suggests its last remnants were destroyed in the 1950s and it lacked sanitation: https://vysehradskej.cz/vzpominky-pametnice-podoli-a-vltava/.
Kublov is also the name of a local tram stop which I spent a *lot* of six-o’clock starts (or earlier) at in 2007. I remember being fascinated by the fact that, even at that time, it was hard to get a seat, yet most of the passengers were clearly no longer of working age.
(Now secretly hoping this series will lead me to discover that the world’s greatest nightclub for people aged sixty and above is located in Braník)
‘Břidlice’ means ‘slate’ – fine-grained sedimentary rocks made from claystones and siltstones.
Slate is usually black or grey, and has excellent insulating properties. It also contains methane, which can be mined as shale gas.
In Czechia, slate is most abundant in Nízký Jeseník – the country’s largest geomorphological region – and in Barrandien, a geological region between Prague and Plzeň.
It’s also quite common here, hence the street name.
However, the first name – in place until 1947, except during the Nazi occupation – was Strossmayerova, after Josip Juraj Strossmayer (1815-1905), Croatian prelate, politician and benefactor. More on him when we get on to Prague 7.
An individual branch of the Sokols will be housed in what is called a sokolovna – such as the opened here in 1933, a mere 22 years after the land was purchased for construction.
The sokolovna wasn’t due to operate for long – it was occupied by German soldiers during WW2, and all the Sokols were closed down entirely in 1948. This one wouldn’t be properly restored until 1997.
The island in question – as you might be able to guess from the map – is Veslařský ostrov. As that has its own street sign, I guess that should be your lot for now.
‘Podkovka’ translates as ‘Hippocrepis’, which itself translates as ‘horseshoe’; it’s a genus of flowering plants, of which there are accepted to be 34 different species.
And, because round here is round here, it was, once upon a time, the name of a local vineyard.
Antonín Engel was born in Poděbrady in 1879; his family moved to Prague shortly after, and he went to school on Malá Strana, graduating in 1897.
After that, he studied architecture and engineering at both ČVUT and its German-speaking counterpart, as well as at the Vienna Academy, where he was awarded a scholarship to Italy.
As he wasn’t able to fight in World War One for health reasons, he continued in this role throughout the period to 1922, when he became a professor at ČVUT (he would ultimately be its rector from 1939 to 1940).
During this time, Engel also joined the state regulatory commission for Greater Prague (founded in 1922, when many districts which we would now think of as being very central finally became part of the city).
Engel was stripped of his professorship in 1948, and had to sell his paintings and valuables to support himself and his family.
In 1956, Engel was contracted to carry out an extension of the waterworks; this sounds like good news, financially speaking, but Engel was royally screwed over by a currency reform which happened a week after he was paid, and reduced the value of said payment by 98%.
Pravá is located, quite literally, to the right of Podolská (if you’re facing the correct way).
OK, vocab time, based on the reminder that, sigh, so many people believe that the right is right:
The ‘pravý opak’ would be the exact opposite or an antithesis, a ‘pravý úhel’ is a right angle, and ‘nazývat věci pravými jmény’ is to call a spade a spade.
You can also use ‘pravá’ to refer to your right foot, and the foot would be implicit.
Levá is located, quite literally, to the left of Podolská (if you’re facing the correct way).
Much of what I wrote above was part of my journey home many years ago, only without 77 steps which I do not miss and worked hard to avoid while walking around Podolí for this series.
From 1934 to 1948, it was called Podolské náměstí.
Miloš Nedvěd was born in 1908. His father, František Nedvěd, would later co-found the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in the early 1920s, and would have a seat in the Senate from 1929 to 1938.
Miloš went to medical school, where he met Zdeňka Nejedlá; they would marry shortly after graduating. She opened a paediatric practice, while he took on a research internship at a clinic. Both, following in their families’ footsteps, were also active in the Communist Party.
When the Nazis established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, both also became active in resistance activities, spreading leaflets and distributing food to families of those who had been arrested.
The Gestapo arrested both of them – and Miloš’s mother – in April 1942 (František Nedvěd was, by this stage, in exile in the Soviet Union, where he would die in 1943), and sent them to Pankrác Prison.
After about half a year, they were transported to Terezín, where they were assigned to provide treatment to their fellow inmates, until they were transferred to Auschwitz in early 1943, where they took on a similar role.
Miloš died there of typhoid a couple of months later; Zdeňka only found out a month later when she was recovering from the same disease.
Later in 1943, Zdeňka was transferred to Ravensbrück. She survived, and returned to her work as a paediatrician in Podolí when the war ended. She stayed in the Communist Party until 1968, when she condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.
For anyone wondering: yes, I agree that it would be nice if the street had been named after both husband and wife, but, when it was named in 1948, Zdeňka was still alive, and streets named after living people are very, very rare indeed.
What's in a Prague street name 
