Rakovník

Rakovník is a town in the Central Bohemian Region of the Czech Republic, known in German as Rakonitz. It has about 16,000 inhabitants and stands on the stream Rakovnický potok in the Rakovník Uplands, roughly 41 kilometres west of Prague and 45 kilometres northeast of Plzeň, on the edge of the Křivoklátsko Protected Landscape Area. The first written mention of the settlement dates from 1252, when it was a market village in the orbit of Křivoklát Castle. It developed quickly in the later sixteenth century, was depopulated by war, plague and floods in the seventeenth, and grew again in the nineteenth, becoming an industrial town whose economy has rested on the Rakovník Brewery, founded in 1454 and one of the oldest in the country, the Rakona soap works, a ceramics factory and shale mining that ended in 2018. The well preserved historic centre is protected as an urban monument zone and holds Husovo náměstí, a square about 400 metres long and the second longest in the Czech Republic, with the Gothic Church of Saint Bartholomew and its bell tower of 1495.