Jewish Quarter (Josefov)

Josefov holds the most complete ensemble of Jewish monuments in Europe, and it survives through history's darkest irony: the Nazis preserved the quarter's synagogues and confiscated Judaica from across the Protectorate, intending — the evidence suggests — a museum of an exterminated people. The community they murdered had been here a thousand years; what remains is now the Jewish Museum in Prague, the largest institution of its kind on the continent, spread across six sites that one circuit ticket covers.

The Old Jewish Cemetery is the heart: 12,000 visible tombstones tilting over an estimated 100,000 burials stacked twelve layers deep, because the medieval ghetto could never expand its ground — so it raised it, again and again, until the graves crested like a frozen wave. Rabbi Loew, the Maharal, lies here under a lion-marked tomb heaped with pebbles and wishes; upstairs in the Old-New Synagogue's sealed attic, legend stores his Golem — the clay defender of the ghetto, deactivated but, the story insists, not gone. The Old-New itself (1270) is Europe's oldest active synagogue, gothic-vaulted and still holding services; the Pinkas Synagogue is the hardest room — its walls hand-inscribed with the names of 78,000 Czech Holocaust victims, restored twice after floods and once after Communist neglect, with the children's drawings from Terezín upstairs.

The Spanish Synagogue closes the circuit in deliberate contrast: a Moorish-revival jewel box of 1868, every surface gilded and patterned like an Alhambra chapel — and its evening classical concerts (strings and organ under that golden dome) are the rare tourist staple that's genuinely sublime, worth building the day around.

Practicalities: the Jewish Museum circuit ticket covers the cemetery and synagogues (the Old-New sells separately); men cover heads where asked (kippot provided), photography rules vary by site — follow them. Give it a half day and take the audio guide or a guided slot; the quarter reads as pretty streets without the context, and it deserves better than pretty. Kafka was born on its edge, and the fin-de-siècle "sanitised" boulevards around (Pařížská's luxury row) are what replaced the razed ghetto — the whole district is a palimpsest best read slowly.