Prague's Golden Lane between legendary alchemists and Kafka

Within the precincts of Prague Castle, squeezed between the northern walls and the buildings of the complex, runs a narrow lane of tiny, brightly coloured houses. The people of Prague call it Zlatá ulička, Golden Lane. Every year thousands of visitors walk along it convinced that they are treading where the alchemists of Rudolf II tried to turn lead into gold. The historical reality is more modest, but no less interesting, and it shows clearly how a place can acquire a legendary identity that ends up overlaying the documented one.

Guards, goldsmiths and a street in the walls

The first dwellings were built at the end of the sixteenth century in the arches of the walls, next to the Daliborka tower and the White Tower. They housed mainly the Castle guards, in particular the marksmen responsible for its defence, who with the permission of the authorities built small houses against the fortifications. During the seventeenth century craftsmen settled there too, including goldsmiths, and the name of the lane most probably derives from them.

For centuries the lane was a poor quarter, inhabited by small craftsmen, servants and humble families. The houses, with one or two rooms, were enlarged and altered as needs required. In the course of the twentieth century they were restored and turned into shops and exhibition spaces, and this is the guise in which we know them today.

The birth of the alchemical legend

The idea that Golden Lane housed the laboratories of the imperial alchemists spread mainly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when Rudolf II's Prague became a favourite theme of Romantic and Decadent literature. The name of the street, combined with the fame of the Rudolfine court, was enough to suggest images of burning furnaces and alembics hidden among the walls. Yet there are no documents placing the activity of the court alchemists in these houses.

Scholars point out that the alchemical laboratories of the period were rather located in other parts of the Castle and in the palaces of the Bohemian nobility, for whom figures such as Edward Kelley worked. Golden Lane therefore received by reflection an aura that belongs to the city as a whole. This does not diminish the charm of the place: on the contrary, it makes it an instructive example of how imaginary geographies are born.

The writer at number 22

Between 1916 and 1917 Franz Kafka used the little house at number 22, rented by his sister Ottla, as a study. He went there in the evenings to write, and during that period he composed several short stories later collected in the volume A Country Doctor. Kafka's presence added a second layer of suggestion to the lane, linked no longer to alchemy but to modern disquiet.

In the nearby Daliborka tower, used as a prison, tradition places the story of the knight Dalibor, imprisoned at the end of the fifteenth century and executed, around whom legends flourished that Bedřich Smetana later took up in his opera of the same name. Towers, prisons and little houses thus form a compact landscape, where every stone seems to have a story to tell.

Today's visitor to Golden Lane can therefore read it on several levels: as evidence of daily life on the margins of the court, as the setting of a nineteenth-century legend and as a stage in the biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. It is precisely this layering that makes the little lane one of the most representative places of magical Prague.