The Jetpacker

Prague is a city known for its elegance and old-world charm.  So it’s a little unusual that one of the best places to view the city would be from a television tower that looks like a rocket… being attacked by crawling babies.  Seriously.

The Žižkov Television Tower was completed in 1992 about a mile and a half from the city center and, yes, the structure looks like a very dated reminder of a post-communist eastern European city.

So, to spruce it up, Czech artist David Černý decorated the outside with a handful of giant, metallic baby statues “crawling” up and down the tower.  But these babies aren’t cute; if fact, we found them downright haunting.  None of the babies had faces, making it look like someone tried to shove a VHS tape into their head, pushing their face into their skull, leaving behind a fleshy rectangular depression.

The tower is 709 feet high, with an observation deck 328 feet up and a restaurant and cafe at 207 feet.  Overlooking Prague from the observation deck was like looking at a Sims game… if Sims existed 200 years ago.  All of the buildings look like slight variations of each other — all seemingly five stories high, five rooms wide, with fading orange and brown roofs.

We visited the tower on the first day of our trip, but if we could do it again, we’d visit on the last day so we could appreciate the scope of Prague and everything we had visited during the trip.

Get hours of operation and ticket information here.