The late-17th-century early-baroque palace opposite the Loreta boasts Prague’s largest monumental facade. This imposing building has housed the foreign ministry since the creation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, except during WWII when it served as the headquarters of the Nazi Reichsprotektor. This is where the documents that dissolved the Warsaw Pact were signed in 1991.
In 1948 Jan Masaryk – son of the Czechoslovak Republic’s founding father, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, and the only noncommunist in the new Soviet-backed government – fell to his death from one of the upper windows. Did he fall, or was he pushed? The 2017 movie Masaryk, by Czech director Julius Sevcík, examines this murky episode in Prague's history.
