Bay Chapel of the Old Town Hall

The historical core of the town hall consists of a Gothic tower added on to Volflin's former house in c. 1364 when it became a new dominant feature of the square. On the east side the tower connects to the town hall chapel of the Virgin Mary and the Patrons of Bohemia, consecrated in 1381 and equipped with a grand bay opening towards the square. The chapel is one of the so-called Wenceslas' monuments, as shown by the heraldic symbols of Wenceslas IV decorating the interior – torses and kingfishers. During the reign of Wladyslaw Jagiello the chapel was rebuilt and consecrated again in 1481.Jiřina Hořejší – Petr Heřman, PRAGA CAPUT REGNI. Glosy ke kulturní historii Staroměstské radnice, in: Staletá Praha XIX. Praha bojující, 1989, p. 40; Jaromír Homolka (ed.), Pozdně gotické umění v Čechách 1471–1526, Odeon, Praha, 1985, p. 216; Václav Vojtíšek, Radnice Staroměstská v Praze. O jejím významu a památkách, A. B. Černý, Praha, 1923, p. 65.

The Gothic core of the original town hall was largely ruined during the May Uprising in 1945. The bay of the chapel suffered the collapse of most of the masonry between the windows. The sandstone statue of the Virgin Mary was also damaged, the so-called Madonna of the Old Town Hall, an important Gothic monument from the 14th century (after the war it was deposited in the Prague City Museum).Srov. Jiřina Hořejší – Petr Heřman, PRAGA CAPUT REGNI. Glosy ke kulturní historii Staroměstské radnice, in: Staletá Praha XIX. Praha bojující, 1989, p. 40. Jiří Stratil, on the contrary, blames the freezing temperatures in 1943 for damaging the statue: http://stratil.blog.idnes.cz/blog.aspx?c=385084 (the author, however, does not cite his sources; accessed 10 July 2017).

The reconstruction on the tower started shortly after the war, between 1945–1947, and it included both the chapel and the astronomical clock.Václav Vojtíšek, Staroměstská radnice, Presidium hlavního města Prahy, Praha, 1948, s. 20; Josef Hájek, Movité památky na Staroměstské radnici v Praze, in: Staletá Praha XXVIII, č. 1, 2012, p. 56. The reconstruction could not return the oldest bell in Prague from 1313 which fell from the damaged tower and broke. In 1946 the art historian Antonín Matějček wrote about the state of the bay: “From all the debris nothing could be used to reconstruct the bay, so a copy of the whole tectonic structure of the bay will need to be made and care must be taken in replacing the statues of the saints, works of romantic Gothic, which over time became historical monuments.”Antonín Matějček, Umělecké ztráty Prahy ve dnech 5. až 8. května 1945, in: Pražská květnová revoluce 1945, Hlavní město Praha, Praha, 1946, p. 77. “Romantic Gothic”, in this case, refers to the 19th century. Nowadays the bay is restored in its pre-war form with the addition of modern stained glass windows with abstract motifs from 1986/1987 by Martin Jiřička to commemorate the restoration works.http://www.vitraz.cz/o-nas.html (accessed 19 June 2017).