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Crowds of people gather every hour between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. beneath the tower of the Old Town Square City Hall(map) on which the Astronomical Clock is located. Everyone waits impatiently to see the procession of the twelve apostles, to see the Turk, Vanity, the Miser and Death come alive, accompanied by bells ringing and the crowing of a cockerel. Not seeing the Astronomical Clock during a visit to Prague is like neglecting to visit the Eiffel Tower during a visit to Paris.

The Prague Astronomical Clock is not only a supreme piece of Czech Gothic scientific and technological work, but also a beautiful artistic monument. As well as four types of time it also shows the movement of the heavenly bodies and, from the 19th century, the days of the calendar along with the zodiac signs and an allegory of the months and 365 church saint’s days.

The clockmaker Mikuláš of Kadan made the clock mechanism for the Prague Astronomical Clock in 1410, most probably according to a design by the professor of mathematics and astronomy Jan Šindela. Throughout the centuries the Astronomical Clock was perfected and repaired several times. During the last days of the Second World War it was damaged quite severely during a fire at the Old Town Square City Hall. It was only restarted after three years of very complicated reconstruction work. The most recent significant repairs took place in 2005, when the astronomical clock was completely disassembled after sixty years. The technical components were renovated and the statues and the lower circle by Joseph Mánes, an important Czech artist and illustrator and a representative of romanticism, who painted the aforementioned calendar panel depicting the signs of the zodiac for the Astronomical Clock, were also restored.