Prague Astronomical Clock

What it is

The Astronomical Clock, the orloj, is mounted on the southern side of the Old Town Hall tower on Old Town Square, and it is a working machine rather than an exhibit behind glass. Prague City Tourism, which runs the building, dates it to 1410 and names Mikuláš of Kadaň as its builder, with the mechanism perfected at the end of the fifteenth century by master Hanuš of Růže. The tower it hangs on is older than the clock: a prismatic Gothic tower 69.5 metres high, completed in 1364 and added to the corner house of Wolflin of Kámen, which had become the seat of the Old Town's administration in 1338 by permission of King John of Bohemia.

Two things matter for planning a visit. The clock itself is on an outside wall, so looking at it costs nothing and needs no ticket; every hour from 8am to 11pm the twelve apostles process across the two small windows above the dials, and the crowd in the square gathers for that. Everything behind the wall — the tower gallery, the Knights' Hall, the chapel, the state rooms and the Romanesque-Gothic underground — is a paid visit with its own opening hours, and that is a separate decision from watching the hour strike.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What's inside

The clock is described by its operator as three parts. At the top are the mechanical figures: the twelve apostles, each with an attribute, appearing in two windows. The left window is led by St Peter with a key, then Matthew with an axe, John with a chalice, Andrew with an X-shaped cross, Philip with a cross and James with a washboard; the right window carries Paul with a book, Thomas with a spear, Simon with a saw, Thaddeus with boards, Bartholomew with leather and Barnabas with a scroll. The wooden apostles now in place were carved by Vojtěch Sucharda in 1948, after the 1945 fire destroyed the earlier set. Beside them the skeleton pulls the rope that starts the walk, the Turk turns his head away, the Miser shakes his purse, the Vain man looks into his mirror, and a rooster crows as the windows close.

Below sit the astronomical dial and the calendar dial, the latter painted with the allegories of the months by Josef Mánes in 1865 — the panel on the wall is Bohumil Číla's 1946 copy. Inside the ticketed building, the tower gallery stands at 42 metres, and the Knights' Hall on the first floor holds the exhibition Resurrection of a Bell and a digital 3D model of the clock.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

How long to spend

Budget an hour for the clock and the tower together, and plan that hour around a whole number on the dial. The apostle procession happens on the hour and is over quickly, so the sensible shape of a visit is to reach the square ten or fifteen minutes early, stand somewhere the two windows are actually visible, watch, and then walk into the building through the ground-floor ticket hall rather than the other way around. Going up first and coming down at four minutes past is how people miss it.

The building itself does not take long. The tower gallery at 42 metres and the Knights' Hall exhibition together are a comfortable half hour if the lift is not queued, and the lift is the usual bottleneck at midday in summer. Add time deliberately if the guided circuits interest you: Prague City Tourism runs its group tours of the historical interiors and tower to a stated usual duration of ninety minutes, and circuit A, which reaches the chapel where the apostle figures can be seen from behind, only runs at published times. The recorded sixty minutes here assumes the procession, the tower and the Knights' Hall, without a guided circuit.

Checked 2026-08-26

Season and crowds

The building keeps two seasonal bands and closes on no day of the week. From April to December it opens Monday to Sunday, 9am to 8pm; from January to March the day is shorter, 10am to 7pm. Around Christmas the operator publishes exceptions rather than the standard band, and its most recent published set ran 9am–3pm on 24 December, 11am–6pm on 25 December, 9am–8pm on 26 December, 9am–4pm on 31 December, 11am–8pm on 1 January and 9am–8pm from 2 to 4 January.

Two of those numbers point at the best hour to arrive. Admission is half price every day during the first hour after opening, which means 9am in the long season and 10am in the short one — the same hour when the square is thinnest and the tower lift is not queued. That discount does not apply on 25 December or 1 January, and the operator notes it is also withheld on days when the building opens late for ceremonial reasons. If the procession is all you want, the hourly show runs from 8am to 11pm, wider at both ends than the building's own hours, so 8pm onwards in summer gives the same clock with a fraction of the audience.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Tickets

Watching the clock from the square is free. Entering the building is not: basic admission is CZK 350, the reduced rate CZK 230 for children aged 6–15, over-65s and holders of a Czech ZTP disability card, CZK 280 for young people aged 16–26, and CZK 750 for a family ticket covering two adults and up to four juniors. Children under 5, and ZTP/P holders with one escort, enter free; Lítačka card holders pay CZK 330. Visitors under 15 are admitted only with an adult over 18. Basic admission covers the Town Hall tower and the Knights' Hall.

Three surcharges sit on top. The tower lift costs CZK 100 for adults, juniors and youth, CZK 50 for over-65s, and nothing for under-5s or ZTP and ZTP/P holders and their escorts. The guided circuits of the historical interiors add CZK 150 for circuit A and CZK 100 for circuit B, payable only on site on the day — they cannot be bought online. A skip-the-line online ticket costs CZK 450 for adults, CZK 360 for youth, CZK 300 for seniors and CZK 900 for a family, and admits the holder to the tower only. Prague City Tourism states it is the only official seller, at its own ticket offices and online through ColosseumTicket, and that tickets bought elsewhere may not be valid.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Getting there

The address the operator publishes is Staroměstské náměstí 1/3, 110 00 Staré Město, Prague 1 — the clock is on the tower's south wall, facing into Old Town Square, and the ticket office is on the ground floor of the building behind it. The same ground floor holds a tourist information centre, the Guides & Tours guide service and a souvenir shop, so it is a useful stop even without a ticket. The ticket hall has a priority counter that skips the queue for Prague Visitor Pass holders, GetYourGuide voucher holders, and anyone who has reserved a private guided tour by phone on +420 775 400 052 or at [email protected].

Wheelchair users have a step-free route to the tower, but not the obvious one: the operator directs them to the passage entrance from Mikulášská street, from which a lift reaches the third floor and a second lift inside the tower, capacity ten, continues up, with a movable platform bridging the two. A manual wheelchair can be borrowed where an electric one does not fit the platform. The historical interiors have no step-free access. Prague City Tourism publishes no driving directions or parking information for the building, and a car is not the way to arrive; the square is walked into.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

What to watch out for

The first trap is the ticket. Prague City Tourism states plainly that it is the only official seller and that tickets bought through other channels may not be valid, so a resold voucher from a street stand is a real risk rather than a theoretical one. The second is scope: the cheaper online skip-the-line ticket admits the holder to the tower alone, not to the historical interiors, and the surcharge for circuits A and B cannot be added online at all — it is paid on site, on the day of the tour.

The third is timing. The guided circuits run only at published times and in a published language, and the daily schedule mixes English, Czech and occasionally French, so a specific slot is worth checking the day before rather than assuming an English tour will be leaving soon. The half-price first hour is withdrawn on 25 December and 1 January, and also on any day the building opens late for ceremonial reasons. Two further constraints catch people at the door: visitors under 15 are admitted only with an adult over 18, and the historical interiors have no step-free access whatever the tower offers. Finally, the square in front of the clock is at its most compressed in the two or three minutes before each hour in high summer — stand back and to the side, not directly beneath.

Checked 2026-08-26 · Source

Photography

The clock faces south, and that single fact decides the day. Through the middle of the day the sun is behind and above the dials, so a phone pointed straight at the wall meters for the sky and returns a dark, flat blue-grey machine. Early morning and the last hours before sunset put the light along the facade instead of behind it, and the gold on the astronomical dial and the painted calendar panel finally read as gold. In the long summer season the building is open until 8pm, which lines up with the good light rather than fighting it.

The apostle windows are small and set high above the dials. A phone's main lens renders them as two dark slots; if the moving figures are the picture, use a telephoto lens or stand further back across the square and crop, and start recording before the hour rather than after, because the sequence is short. The tower gallery at 42 metres is a different subject altogether — Týn Church across the square, the roofscape, and the square's crowd seen from directly above, which is the one angle that shows how tightly people pack in. Frames from the gallery need a steady grip: the parapet is high and the wind at the top is not still.

Checked 2026-08-26

Where it is

Nearby

External links

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