Prague Guide
Prague
Josefov
By the middle of the nineteenth century all that was left of the former ghetto of JOSEFOV were six synagogues, the town hall and the medieval cemetery. At the end of the nineteenth century, it was decided that Prague should be turned into a beautiful bourgeois city, modelled on Paris. The key to this transformation was the "sanitization" of the ghetto, a process, begun in 1893, which reduced the notoriously malodorous backstreets and alleyways of Josefov to rubble and replaced them with block after block of luxurious five-storey mansions. The Jews, the poor, the Gypsies and the prostitutes were cleared out so that the area could become a desirable residential quarter, rich in Art Nouveau buildings festooned with decorative murals, doorways and sculpturing.