Prague

Prague offers school groups a compact, largely intact medieval and Baroque city centre where a thousand years of European history can be walked in a single morning. For History departments in particular, it is one of the few capitals where the Holy Roman Empire, the Habsburg era, the Nazi occupation, Communist rule and the Velvet Revolution are all legible in the same few square kilometres of streets.

Groups typically work across Prague Castle and St Vitus Cathedral, the Jewish Quarter of Josefov with the Old-New Synagogue and the Old Jewish Cemetery, and the Pinkas Synagogue, whose walls carry the names of Czech and Moravian Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Museum of Communism and the Memorial to the Victims of Communism on Petřín cover the post-war decades, while Wenceslas Square and the National Museum at its head anchor discussion of 1968 and 1989. The National Memorial to the Heroes of the Heydrich Terror, in the crypt of the Church of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Nové Město, gives students a precise, sobering site for the study of resistance under occupation.