consulting the chronicle…
Beside the Vltava, between the bridge and the hill, a thousand years of one city rendered as a chronicle of moments. Founders, defenestrations, premieres, occupations, the bridge, the clock, the Revolution.
Prague is a city that keeps its records. Six centuries of stone, two world wars, three regime changes, and the river still runs north under the same bridge. The chronicler's task is not to inventory it but to choose: which mornings, which windows, which premieres.
This codex begins around 870, on a hill that the Slavs called Hradčany, and runs to the present. The unit is the moment, not the year. Each folio is a single event, told plainly, with its sources beneath. An oracle, trained on the corpus, sits at the bottom of every page. Ask it anything within the chronicle.
An interactive narrative through the chronicle, scene by scene and era by era. Browse the city's story from Hradčany hill to the present, or play it through as a single arc.
The Chronica Pragensia is a folio of the Codex Vloriensis, the imaginary manuscript through which a small operation in Vlorë, on the Albanian coast, transcribes histories that interest it. The chronicle now stands at 141 folios, c. 870 to the present, and continues to be written.
Voice: present tense for historical facts. Latin, Czech, and German phrases italicized, in garnet. The chronicler is not impartial, exactly, but is faithful to the sources, and names them. Where the legend is older and stronger than the science (Master Hanuš blinded; the eggs in the bridge mortar), the legend is told and the science noted.
The hero images above are public-domain photographs from Wikimedia Commons. If any have failed to load, the night-blue of the Orloj dial stands in for them.