Restorers Start on the Golden Lane's Facades, Working Back to Trnka's 1955 Colours for 6.5 Million

Restorers have begun work on the painted facades of the little houses in the Golden Lane at Prague Castle, and will be at it for the coming months. The announcement comes from the Prague Castle Administration, as a press release reprinted by Praha 1 on 7 October. The repair is costed at over six and a half million crowns.

The brief is to get the outside of the houses back to the state of 1955, when the architect Pavel Janák laid out the lane in collaboration with the artist Jiří Trnka. That is the scheme the colours belong to, and it is the one the restoration treats as the reference: the original coloured renders are to be restored with respect for that appearance.

What is actually being done

Specialists will first clean the facades of dirt and of unsuitable coatings applied since. Cracks are then to be filled by injection. Windows and doors get repaired, and chimneys will be repaired where they can be reached. The work is divided into stages so that visitor operation is not restricted — the lane stays open while it happens.

The sequence starts at the Daliborka tower, at house number 12, and moves upward from there. One house is left out. Number 19 is excluded from this repair because Prague Castle is preparing a separate project for it, on account of the poor state of its structure. That is the line worth keeping an eye on: a facade repair is a cosmetic programme, and the house that needs more than cosmetics has been taken out of it rather than folded in.

Pavel Vyhnánek, the director of the Prague Castle Administration, gave the reason for going now:

The Golden Lane last underwent reconstruction fifteen years ago. Over the years that have passed, weather conditions have left their mark on the outer skin of the little houses, and on some of them larger cracks have appeared. Thousands of visitors walk through the lane every day and we want them to leave with a pleasant experience.

— Pavel Vyhnánek, director of the Prague Castle Administration

Why the houses are the shape they are

The lane owes its present form to the northern parkán wall built under Vladislav Jagellonský, raised later under Rudolf II and fitted with a shooting gallery. In 1597 Rudolf II allowed the castle marksmen to wall up the arches of that gallery and make small chambers in them, which is the foundation of everything standing there now. The houses were then sold and inherited in the ordinary way. After Joseph II abolished the corps of castle marksmen the spaces were let out; in 1952 the houses were bought up and the lane was restored as a demonstration of how the poorer classes had lived. Further alterations in the 1960s turned some of the houses into showpiece shops.

Read against that sequence, the current job is narrower than any of it. It is a repair of the skin, on a timetable set by weather and footfall rather than by a change of use, and the six and a half million crowns is the price of that narrowness. The press release names neither the restorers nor a completion date, and gives no figure for the separate project on number 19 — which is where the expensive work on this lane is now waiting.