What good would a privilege be to a town if it could not prove that it really exists? Documents relating to the life of the town were always kept in the town hall or at the aldermen’s, so that they could be both easily accessible and well guarded. At the beginning, a simple chest did the job of an archive. It was not an ordinary chest, though. One needed many keys to be able to open it. In Prague’s Old Town, for instance, used to be seven keys. These keys were given to the aldermen.
People did realize how important different documents and instruments were, that is why they started making lists to allow a better orientation in them. Prague did not have it own archive until the four historical Prague towns merged in 1784. It was then that Prague City Hall was established and it became the administrator of all four archives which until then had been kept separate. In 1842, Václav Vladivoj Tomek, known as the author of the History of Prague, was the first person to put the archive in order. Nine years later, another important man of letters started working in the archives. It was Karel Jaromír Erben. Over time, the archive became well arranged, with lists and files which made it easy to look for any document. Another important date for the archive was when 37 communities were joined to the city and thus their archives were taken over by the administration of Prague City Archives. The head of the archive of that time was Václav Vojtíšek, who modernized it. However, his work and the work of his colleagues was destroyed by the fire in the Old Town Hall in May 1945. The files were eaten away by flames and thus the following generations of archivists had to put together all that had taken more than one hundred years to create. Luckily, a great number of documents had been moved somewhere else and thus were not affected by the disaster. Nonetheless, Václav Vladivoj Tomek’s work and some other documents were lost forever. Thanks to industrious and educated people at the head of the archive, the institution continued its activities also during the communist regime. This made it possible to preserve resources relating to the year 1968. Up to the present, these resources have been a great help for all researchers. A great leap forward came with the new archive in Chodovec, which was open in 1997.
The new archive contains some twenty kilometres of documents. There are also seals and photographs mostly from the studios of Jindřich Eckert and Jan Kříženecký, which greatly document the development that the city has undergone. There are also maps which give a good picture of changes in the city throughout the years.
Why do we have archives? Different city bodies often base their decisions on documents filed with the city archives. For example, even the names of some streets take account of what the place was like in history. And when someone needs to trace back some documents that affected the life of the city, they will find these documents in the archive. Without archives, whether these are big institutions or our private home documents, we lose our history. And without history there is neither man, nor city.