An address before numbers
The house at the stone maiden was a working address people used.
Palickap — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Palickap — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Barocco — CC0 · Palickap — CC BY 4.0
A historic house in central Brno that takes its name from a stone figure of a woman set into its facade, an example of a medieval European convention that no longer makes sense to us. Before houses were numbered, addresses had no numbers. Houses were known by their signs: a statue, a relief, an animal or a trade emblem fixed to the front, and people said the house at the Golden Stag or the house of the stone maiden. Those signs were the address. The system ended in the late eighteenth century when the Austrian empire imposed house numbering for conscription and taxation, but many of the signs stayed on the facades and the names remained in local use. Brno and Prague are full of them. Once you know this, walking an old town changes: every statue or relief on a facade was an address people used daily. A plain practical point: the house is private and not visitable inside. The visit is minutes in front of the facade on a walk through central Brno.
The house at the stone maiden was a working address people used.
Austria numbered houses in the eighteenth century for conscription and tax.
Once you know the system, every relief on a front becomes readable.
Old town, Brno
Minorite Monastery, BrnoA monastic complex in old central Brno going back to the thirteenth century, its1 min walk
The Labyrinth under the Vegetable MarketA city beneath the city: the Vegetable Market, trading since the thirteenth cent2 min walk
Alfa PalaceA functionalist building of the 1930s in central Brno, containing a covered shop2 min walk
The Old Town HallThe oldest secular building in Brno, dating from the thirteenth century, and the2 min walk
Klein PalaceA mid-nineteenth-century palace on Náměstí Svobody, Brno's main square, built by3 min walkIn both Brno and Prague. In Prague, Nerudova street climbing to the castle is the best known: its facades are covered in signs — the White Violin, the Two Golden Eagles, the Red Crayfish — and all were addresses. Walk it slowly and look above the doors.
Not as a destination. Learn the system and then notice it as you walk central Brno, and all the facades become more interesting. Brno is a city better walked without a list of sights.
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