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PRAGUE'S HIDDEN SECRETS - EXPLAINED BY AN ARCHITECT (Honest Guide)
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May 6, 2025
You're invited to explore Prague's hidden secrets. Unusual art, material and a stamp of time. Our friend architect Adam Gebrian took us on a tour to reveal some of Prague's secrets from the architectural point of view. Help us create more videos by joining us on Patreon http://patreon.com/honestguide Thank you, our creative journey would not have been possible without your help Our BOOK: https://honest.blog/shop/honest-guide-en/ (Best places for beer, coffee & food included) Honest Guide on Instagram: https://instagram.com/realhonestguide Janek: https://instagram.com/janekrubes/ Honza: https://instagram.com/honzamikulka/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HonestPragueGuide/ Music we use for our videos: https://bit.ly/HonestMusic (A great website for creators. This is an affiliate link and we may earn a commission if you purchase through our link.) Thank you for your support! Honza Mikulka & Janek Rubeš, Prague based journalists #HonestGuide
View Video Transcript
0:00
Hello and welcome to Prague! Today we're going to show you some secrets that may be hidden from you
0:04
You may know all the buildings and all the streets that you can walk on, but did you know
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there are places where you can walk inside the buildings, and I don't mean inside offices or
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stores, but inside passageways and arcades. And for that reason, today I invited my friend
0:18
architect, Ahoj Adam. Hello Adam. He knows a lot about architecture. He was already on one of our
0:24
episodes and he's going to show us all the secrets hidden inside. There's quite a lot of beautiful
0:30
spaces inside designed by great architects with great details and we can see it and if you come
0:35
ever to Prague you can easily visit because it's open for everyone
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pretty much all day except maybe some night hours so let's go. Let's go
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So if you enter this palace which has been built in 1927 it's actually a surprisingly big space
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which is open for everyone and of course it's a main entry towards the theater which is at the
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back of the block and usually the theater is underground because theater and cinema are spaces
1:05
which doesn't need natural light so it's underneath no natural light but if you are here you would
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like to have a natural light and you have it because the roof is always made out of glass
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you're gonna see very different designs but it's always the same principle bring the natural light
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in and don't see the inner block because there's a privacy of people living in there so you don't
1:27
see through but the light can go through and once you enter this you realize there are actually
1:32
beautiful nice things incredible lights nice shop windows door handles so this is relatively
1:40
well done with like a lot of money a lot of effort and it shows it's been an important public space
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so you invite people to come in to wait for the theater to go down for the theater and then
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spend your time and talk and maybe buy something and sit and enjoy your time. So you are not outside
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you are kind of inside, there is no rain but you are in a public space. So over here behind us
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there is the entry to the theater so you can go down by two staircases and there's pretty big
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space underneath but this is kind of space where you wait before you go and if you raise your head
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suddenly you realize there's pretty beautiful detail of a clock kind of like telling you okay
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it's gonna start i have to go in and i really like that because like it shows okay this is the space
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where people spend their time so let's do something that they could really realize they
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could really see and they could think about and me and hanza never noticed the clock
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we're just a few meters from the house we were just in or the passageway and we're still parallel
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with the wenceslav square and we're going to enter another one where the first thing i would notice
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is the Euronet ATM. But the thing which I think needs to be said is
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that once you see this, it's not very inviting. It's kind of like dark, it seems like dangerous
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and it seems almost like dead end But actually I think it very difficult to find dead ends in Prague So actually you can go and you can explore and even though it dark it extremely safe Prague is one of the safest cities in the world so I think nothing can happen to you
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And once you enter, you realize it's back again quite interesting. Not from the view of the street, but once you are in there, you realize it
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This video is supposed to also be an invitation for you to walk into any open door that you see
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What I really enjoy sometimes is to think about how this building looked when it was
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built and what was the situation. This was 1938, so 1938, like 80 years ago, quite a lot of traditional things and suddenly
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this, almost a futuristic design, which feels like a cruiser or something like that, or
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an alien space with new materials, new details, new design. And once you enter this, I think you felt like in a new world
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in kind of like, you know, world is gonna come. And now I think like, you know
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sure it's in a relatively bad condition and it's not very much used
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So yeah, we didn't move like in 80 years to some better conditions, rather the opposite
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We are at the end of the same passage and at the beginning we showed you let's say the current
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condition which I don't think is really good or are the opposite really bad condition but in here
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suddenly I think it's fantastic. We are in front of a coffee place called Swim and it shows that
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it doesn't need much you just really need to clean it open it no advertisement anything because you
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see everything inside it's that open that you know it's obvious that inside there's a cafe so
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you don't have to tell everyone and as i said before i think suddenly it feels still futuristic
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even though it's 80 years old so it shows the quality and the quality just needs to be repaired
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maintain, clean and present it and that's it. And you know, I'm really sad that I don't see more of this and less of what we've seen
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It's rather the opposite. This is quite an exemption and I would be super happy if this is not an
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exemption. This is a rule that shows a respect to the quality of previous architecture
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Shots fired! and you may actually know this coffee place from our previous video and now you know from
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whom I know the place from Adam we are standing in front of one of the most important buildings of
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the city centre It a multifunctional palace Lucerna and it one of the first truly modern building once you look from outside you would never guess because outside it looks relatively
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historically but actually the construction is super modern concrete skeleton system if you
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would see just the construction it would look like contemporary building and it's a building
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which should contain everything you need for your life so you can live there you can work there you
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can go for fun you can eat you can spend all your time go for cinema ballroom all sorts of things
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and you don't have to leave that building at all that's the kind the idea so it's it's pretty big
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building and you can again enter you can enter via passage and what is quite surprising is that it's
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not just one passage suddenly you can split in different directions and it's pretty big block
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which contains individual different buildings but they are connected by the system of passages
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so I think somebody at the very beginning said look we can actually benefit if we connect our
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shops and possibilities together and it's going to be much bigger and much better for everyone
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to come inside and it works till today. This place is famous especially for all the tourists because they come here for the famous
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statue of the horse hanging upside down but i guess you didn't take us here for that no i don't
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come because of this i usually come because of the quality of space and materials and from the
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entry it looks relatively modest that is similar to pretty much all prague passages and once you
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get inside suddenly the space gets bigger and in here this is a kind of important crossing so you
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can go to the cinema you can go to the bar you can go to the cafe you can go to the spaces in
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here you can connect to the different passage of Rococo and normally they have different opening
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hours so actually they almost cover the entire oh absolutely when the coffee place shuts down you
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go to the music club when the movie theater is over you go to the coffee place and so on and so
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on so it really is a cool spot and you may know it from our episode because we actually had our
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party up on the roof here and there's a paterno star elevator so there's really everything here
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So we are in the same system of passages as in Lucerna, but we are in different buildings
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And in here what I really hate in this place is that if you look up, then suddenly this
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should be the space for the natural light and it's not. Over there you could see these glass blocks, but you know, pretty much all of them damaged
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And in here they are covered by paint and by bitumen, by something which would prevent the leaking
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And of course, that's the cheapest solution to that. And I understand why it's done
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But the problem is that there is not enough light or there is no light
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So the light is completely artificial. And maybe in here you would say okay that relatively small but we can just move to another place and to another place and you going to see huge holes with no light just because of that And I really hope that in the future this is going to be open again and there going to be enough of the light and it would completely change the atmosphere of this place
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We are in Passage Světozor that we showed you many times on our videos because there's
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a great cafeteria, they sell chlebíčky, they have some cheap candy, but once again you're
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not taking us here for that. No, I love this advertisement. I actually call it the only billboard I like
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So it's a stained glass advertisement, but whenever there's a sun coming through this
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it completely changes the atmosphere of the entire passage. So it's just one thing, one element, and it kind of overshadows everything else
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But on the other hand, the vault is quite nice. We talk about 40s, it's like 48, 49, and again, same principle, natural light
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but you can't see through. But the design is a bit different. So if you go through these passages in Prague, you're going to realize that every single one of them is different
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but actually you share the same DNA. And actually we just moved a couple of meters from Luzerna to here and if we turn a right angle we can enter another passage
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So it's really a connection of the roads like really following each other and at the end we're gonna be back at the Wenceslas Square
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So we're at the bottom of Wenceslas Square
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So we did walk through, what is it, four different buildings almost and with a dry foot because
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it's not raining. Yeah, so actually very small part of the city, but in a way, I think quite rich
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If you say something about the spatial experience and the details and the quality of space
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So that tells you that there is much more of this. And of course not only in Prague, also in other cities in Czech Republic and not only
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in Czech Republic. But it is this kind of like hidden, different part of the city that maybe it's not a destination
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and normally you would not go. But now in these conditions, I think you've got pretty much time to discover these things
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and I think you should do it because it's quite interesting. Adam, I thank you very much
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You're welcome. If you're interested more in Adam and more about the Czech architecture and or architecture
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in general, look him up on Instagram and you will see a lot of architectural stuff from Prague
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That's it from Prague. Thank you for watching The Honest Guide. A lot of the knowledge you know from our videos is partially from Adam
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That's why we invited him for an episode. If you subscribe, we'll see you here next Sunday
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And the Czech word at the end is průchod, which is passage or passageway. Průchod
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