# Prague's Dark Side Is Written in Blood, Secrets and Stone

In Prague, Czech Republic, a walking tour called Prague Dark Side Tour: True Crimes, Murders, Prostitution & Drugs takes visitors through centuries of executions, Communist repression and never-solved crimes — and has been listed as an active, bookable experience on Viator and TripAdvisor with 2026 updates.

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Where the Tour Begins

The tour departs from the Prague Underground and Ghost Tours ticket office at Malé Náměstí Square Nr. 459/11 — inside a passage roughly 20 metres to the right of the Black Angel bar, in Prague 1. The square sits at the heart of the Old Town, and that location is no accident. This part of the city has witnessed public executions, underworld crime and political violence across five centuries.

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The Executioner of Old Town Square

The tour's opening chapter belongs to Jan Mydlář, Prague's most famous professional executioner. His story is anchored at Old Town Square (Staroměstské náměstí), where public executions were once staged as civic spectacle. On 21 June 1621, 27 leaders of the Bohemian anti-Habsburg uprising were executed here in a single morning — one of the most notorious mass executions in Central European history. The tour covers both the mechanics of that day and the eventual abolition of the death sentence in Bohemia, tracing the role of the executioner through the city's legal and moral evolution.

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The Communist Machine: Numbers That Don't Lie

Prague's Communist chapter (1948–1989) is not treated as distant political history here — it is framed as organised state crime. The tour visits sites connected to the secret police, their surveillance apparatus, and the culture of political imprisonment that defined life in Czechoslovakia for four decades.

The human cost is documented at the Victims of Communism Memorial, which records:

• **205,486 people arrested**
• **170,938 forced into exile**
• **4,500 who died in prison**
• **327 shot while attempting to escape**
• **248 executed**

The tour connects these numbers to real streets and real buildings — including the former secret police headquarters — and covers the Communist coup of 1948, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Soviet invasion, and the Velvet Revolution of 1989. The story of student Jan Palach, who set himself on fire in January 1969 in protest of the Soviet occupation, is included as one of the most visceral acts of political resistance in modern European history.

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Operation Anthropoid: The Most Dangerous Assassination in WWII

One of the tour's most significant historical threads concerns Operation Anthropoid — the Allied mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia and one of the principal architects of the Holocaust. In May 1942, Czech paratroopers Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš attacked Heydrich's car in Prague. He died of his wounds shortly after in a Prague hospital.

The paratroopers took refuge in the crypt of the Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius, where Nazi forces eventually tracked them down. The retaliation was catastrophic: the village of Lidice was razed to the ground, its men shot, its women sent to concentration camps, and its children gassed. The cathedral crypt remains one of Prague's most sombre and historically significant sites.

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Cold Cases, Brothels and the Police Archive

The tour does not restrict itself to political violence. It also moves through the city's criminal underworld — past the sites of former brothels, corners associated with organised crime, and churches that carry their own disgraced histories. Guides draw on early scientific investigation techniques, mafia murders, serial killer cases and stories pulled from old police archives. Several cases covered have never been solved.

This combination of forensic history and unsolved mystery makes the Prague Dark Side Tour unusual: it functions simultaneously as a crime history lecture, a Communist-era reckoning and a tour of genuinely eerie locations.

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Practical Information

Meeting point: Prague Underground and Ghost Tours ticket office, Malé Náměstí Square Nr. 459/11, inside passage 20 m right of Black Angel bar, 110 00 Praha 1.

Price and duration: Pricing starts from approximately $44 for related tours listed on TripAdvisor; contact the operator directly for current rates and session times.

Booking: The tour can be reserved through Viator's Prague Crime Tours listings, where availability and up-to-date scheduling are maintained.

Prague does not hide its history — it builds bars and bookshops on top of it. This tour is for travellers who want to stand in the exact places where that history happened.