Our insatiable wanderlust combined with our love for the All Souls Trilogy has taken us to a truly enchanted city where Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo live side by side in perfect harmony. Welcome to Prague, the city of a hundred spires! Our German neighbors presumably dubbed it Spur Street because that was the only way you could persuade a horse to make the climb. Like every other residence on the street, ours had a symbol over the door rather than a house number.
Nerudova is named for Jan Neruda, a 19th-century journalist and fiction writer. The street is lined with old buildings with the characteristic doorway signs that once served as street addresses. The surviving signs have been carefully restored and are now protected by law. They represent the family name, the occupation, or hobbies of the people who once inhabited the houses The Three Ravens doorway sign is fictitious.
The doorway sign tradition lasted until the s, when empress Maria Theresa decreed that numbers be used in order to collect taxes more effectively.
In the 18th century, there were about door signs in Prague, and nowadays, only remain. The back of the building was rebuilt in and today houses the Czech Development Agency, and the Institute of International Relations.
Although the neighborhood is now filled with old noble palaces, housing foreign embassies, you can still have fun searching for the picturesque doorway signs. For a list of over-the-door signs, go to this fabulous website. At the top of the hill, we took a sharp turn into a neighborhood filled with the mansions of aristocrats and court appointees, called Hradcany.
