Where Saint Wenceslas Had His Hair Cut

Neklan is said to have resided at the castle already, and about the year 875 Bořivoj I built here, nearer the front gate — that is, roughly where the present court chapel stands — the first church of Our Lady in this place. In that church the hair-cutting rite of the seven-year-old Saint Wenceslas was celebrated. It was the first church in Prague; older than it were only the church of Saint Clement at Levý Hradec, where the old castle of the Bohemian princes still stood in the twelfth century, and a second church of the same name at Vyšehrad. And because the little church of Our Lady was soon overshadowed by the new churches of Saint George and Saint Vitus, it disappeared in the thirteenth century — but because people read of a church of Our Lady in Prague, later generations supposed that this meant the church in the Týn.