Nove Mesto - The Rough Guide to Prague - page 176

At the southern end of Karlovo náměstí is the so-called Faustův dům , a salmon-pink and
grey late Baroque building with a long and preposterous history of alchemy. An occult priest
from Opava owned the house in the fourteenth century and, two hundred years later in 1590,
international con-man and Rudolf II's favourite English alchemist Edward Kelley bought it
as a base for his attempts to turn worthless metals into gold, though he only spent a year here
before being arrested for fraud and imprisoned in Křivoklát Castle. The building is also the
traditional setting for the Czech version of the Faust legend, with the arrival one rainy night
of a penniless and homeless student, Jan Šťastný (meaning lucky, or in Latin Faustus ). Find-
ing money in the house, he decides to keep it - only to discover that it was put there by the
Devil, who then claims his soul in return. A pharmacy ( lekárna ) now occupies the ground
floor.
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Sv Cyril and Metoděj and Heydrich Martyrs' Monument
Corner Resslova and Na Zderaze • Church Sat 8-9.30am, Sun 9am-noon Monument March-Oct Tues-Sun
9am-5pm; Nov-Feb Tues-Sun 9am-5pm • 75Kč • pamatnik-heydrichiady.cz • Metro Karlovo náměstí
Just off Karlovo náměstí, down noisy Resslova, the Orthodox cathedral of sv Cyril and
Metoděj was constructed by Bayer and Dientzenhofer for the Roman Catholics in the eight-
eenth century; since the 1930s it has been the mother ship of the Orthodox Church in the
Czech Lands. Amid all the traffic, it's extremely difficult to imagine the scene here on June
18, 1942, when seven Czechoslovak secret agents involved in the assassination of Reihard
Heydrich , the most dramatic assassination of World War II, were besieged in the church by
hundreds of Waffen SS. Acting on a tip-off by one of the Czech resistance who turned him-
self in, the Nazis surrounded the church just after 4am and fought a pitched battle for more
than six hours, trying explosives, flooding and any other method they could think of (notice
the bullet-pocked slit in the exterior south wall) to drive the men out of their stronghold in
the crypt. Eventually, all seven agents committed suicide rather than give themselves up. A
plaque at street level on the south wall commemorates those who died, and an exhibition on
the whole affair - the Heydrich Martyrs' Monument - is situated in the crypt itself; the
entrance is underneath the church steps on Na Zderaze.