I'm Going Deeper Underground

It's interesting to see how many cities we've been to that have an underground tour. Prague is a city that used to be much lower and it turns out all the old buildings we've been wandering past on the street used to be the first or second floor.
In the old town square, and more specifically the old town hall, there's a room with large tiled mosaics on both walls. Mostly it's used for weddings nowadays but the door pictured leads down to some of the preserved buildings underneath the (current) street level.
Getting down there was much less involved than in Berlin as most of the rooms were used up until quite recently. That and they were never meant to be shelters of any kind, several rooms being used as store rooms or in some cases prisons.
The first room contained a giant burnt cross, one of the many religious symbols that had suffered at the hands of the many religious purges in Prague's history. When the citizens aren't busy throwing town councils out of windows that is. Also along the wall are statues of many of Prague's more famous and influential people including King Wenceslas, a great favourite among the Czech people.

As we continued down we passed through what was once the ground floor of the tower, and then through several old houses which had each been built with a common wall to save on building materials. This was not terribly successful when people had, as we saw in one room, large ovens in their houses and fires quite often broke out. The oven we did see was constructed by Italian immigrants and had several small bones peppered through the stonework. They had taken all the household animals that had died and incorporated them into the oven to keep the good luck in the house.
As we passed over a bridge between houses we saw what was once the original street level a few metres below us and discovered why this had all been buried. During Prague's expansion into a town from a little village on the river no town fortifications had yet been built. Add to this the problem of the river rising and flooding the town and both problems were solved in one go. When building a fortified wall around the town a moat was also dug outside. This earth was used to raise the level of the streets, essentially burying the first level of each house underneath the new streets.
We also saw an example of Prague's old heraldic emblem. The version we saw shows the gate of the Charles Bridge and this was later modified to include a sword in front of the entrance after the residents successfully defended themselves from an angry invading Danish army.
We also saw several replicas of various pikes and weapons used at the time and a measuring device which included scales and the standard unit of measurement in Prague.
All in all another fascinating tour with a lot of the history of Prague revealed and sights we wouldn't normally see just wandering the streets on our own.