Gaze at the towering stone facade slightly to your right to see a large double-dial clock featuring bright blue and gold circles flanked by small painted wooden statues. You are standing in front of the Prague astronomical clock, or the Orloj, attached right here to the Old Town Hall we were just talking about.
For centuries, a rather gruesome legend surrounded this medieval masterpiece. People believed a master clockmaker named Hanus built it in 1490, and that the city councillors were so terrified he might build a better clock for a rival city that they ordered him blinded. According to the tale, the blind clockmaker exacted his revenge by reaching into the machinery and breaking it, ensuring no one could fix it for a hundred years. It is a fantastic story, but it is completely false. Records later proved the clock was actually created much earlier, in 1410, by a horologist named Mikulas of Kadan and a university math professor named Jan Sindel.
The clock has three main sections. The top face is a mechanical astrolabe. An astrolabe is an ancient astronomical instrument used to map the sky and track the positions of the sun, moon, and stars. You can think of this dial as a primitive planetarium displaying the state of the universe. The blue circle right in the center represents Earth, while the moving golden sun and the half-silvered moon track the sky. That moon phase mechanism is incredibly unique because it is powered entirely by gravity. A small weight on a screw-thread slowly turns it, advancing just two gear teeth every single day.
If you happen to be here at the top of the hour, you will catch a famous mechanical show. The four figures flanking the top dial represent traits the medieval creators despised. The skeleton on the right is Death. On the hour, Death pulls a rope to ring a bell, and the other three figures, representing vanity, greed, and lust, vigorously shake their heads to show they are not quite ready to die. Above them, two small windows slide open for the Walk of the Apostles, a procession of wooden statues. Sadly, these wooden figures, along with the nearby buildings, burned heavily when Nazi armored vehicles fired on the square during that same 1945 uprising. It took a massive restoration effort to get the clock ticking again by 1948.
The bottom dial is the calendar plate, which tracks the days of the year alongside allegories for the months. The original was painted in 1866 by artist Josef Manes, but a copy was put in its place to protect the original. Believe it or not, this calendar caused a massive scandal recently. In 2022, a local heritage group realized a painter hired to restore the reproduction had completely changed the faces, ages, and even genders of the original figures. It turned out he had painted the faces of his friends into the masterpiece, possibly as a bizarre joke. The city council called the botched job an amateurish disaster, proving that even a six-hundred-year-old clock can still stir up fresh drama.
When you are ready, we'll continue exploring the origins of Praha.
