You have crossed nearly nine centuries of institutions without leaving the old centre. The useful habit to keep is simple: when a building looks timeless, ask who used it, who replaced them, and which layer survived.

Olomouc’s two main squares look like a catalogue of respectable monuments until you start reading what they actually say. In less than two kilometres, the city recruits Hercules to defend its eagle, claims Julius Caesar as a legendary founder, remembers plague in stone, gives Neptune a landlocked job, replaces a Christian saint with Jupiter, and lets a twentieth-century communist regime redesign an astronomical clock. This compact walk treats the centre as a sequence of deliberate edits to civic identity rather than a checklist of attractions. Every stop is outdoors, close to the next, and built around a detail you can still inspect from the street.
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