House number 22
The small blue house where Franz Kafka worked in 1916 and 1917 — the most famous literary address in Prague.
Diego Delso — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Ray Swi-hymn from Sijhih-Taipei, Taiwan — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Ray Swi-hymn from Sijhih-Taipei, Taiwan — CC BY-SA 2.0 · Ray Swi-hymn from Sijhih-Taipei, Taiwan — CC BY-SA 2.0
He did not live in the lane, but he used house 22 as a writing room for a few months in 1916 and 1917 — his sister Ottla had rented it. He came in the evenings to write in the quiet, then went back to his lodgings in the city.
Some visitors complain about the crush and about houses being partly souvenir shops, which is fair at midday. But empty in the early morning it is a completely different place, and one of the loveliest corners of the castle.
Outside official visiting hours the lane is sometimes open to walk through without a ticket, but the houses are shut. Check the castle's seasonal hours on the official site before relying on it.
Half an hour when it is quiet, an hour if you go into every house and the armoury passage. At peak times you may spend half of that queueing between doors.
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The Golden Lane is a small street inside the walls of Prague Castle, its houses built against the northern rampart in the 16th century for the castle guards and their families. The doors are low, the ceilings short and the rooms only a few metres across — because the people who lived here were poor and built into whatever gap was left between the wall and the nobles' houses. The name has nothing to do with mined gold but with goldsmiths who later worked here, and over time legends attached themselves about alchemists trying to make gold for Emperor Rudolf II — fine stories with no direct historical basis. What is certain is that Franz Kafka worked in house number 22 for a short period in 1916 and 1917, writing there in the quiet of the night. The houses are now small museums: a fortune-teller's, a goldsmith's, a stargazer's, a guard's, and at the end an upper passage along the wall with a collection of armour, weapons and old cells. The lane is very crowded in the middle of the day and too narrow to pass comfortably — come in the first hour after opening or the last before closing.
The small blue house where Franz Kafka worked in 1916 and 1917 — the most famous literary address in Prague.
Houses refitted with their original occupants' tools — goldsmith, fortune-teller, guard — showing how life fitted into a few square metres.
A long gallery above the houses holding armour, weapons and guard figures — with windows over the Stag Moat.
A prison tower at the end of the lane with its old cells — its story gave Smetana the subject of an entire opera.
Zlatá ulička, inside Prague Castle, Prague 1