Havelské Market, Prague

At Havelské Market, you are looking at a working marketplace whose stalls still trade every day. Its setting carries the memory of Havelské město, a compact settlement that once existed within Prague’s Old Town while keeping its own law and administration. Under King Wenceslaus I, the locator Eberhard laid out this new community around the parish church of St Gall from 1232 to 1234.

The church gave the quarter its name: svatý Havel in Czech. The settlement was absorbed into the Old Town in 1287. Its market was once known as the New Market, created to rival the older marketplace on today’s Old Town Square. The surviving streets preserve the shape of that medieval commercial world, where trade divided the original market into several street lines.