A Bohemian Rhapsody

by David Gourley

Cathy and I first went to Prague in 1993, some three years after the Velvet Revolution and soon after the Velvet Divorce, when the Czech and Slovak republics went their separate ways. We fell in love with the city: it is in our view the most beautiful city in the world, Venice possibly excepted. We went back no less than four times. However the last of these visits was over ten years ago; the time had come, we thought, to renew our acquaintance.

We found an excellent package which combined a good hotel with Club Class flights, in both directions, with BA. We have seen packages which are comparably priced, offering good hotels but only Economy Class travel. There was the worry that, because of BA’s seemingly interminable dispute with its cabin crew (since resolved), the flights might not run. But all was fine and we enjoyed good flights with charming crew.

Our package might have included business class travel but it did not include transfers to and from Ruzyne airport. Taxis in Prague have acquired a certain notoriety with unwitting foreigners charged extortionate fares. There were prominent notices at the airport directing arriving passengers to the officially recommended firm but even this would have charged an arm and a leg to take us into Central Prague. A helpful lady on the information desk suggested an alternative that cost us next to nothing. We got a 100 bus to Zlicin, at the end of Metro Line B. From there the train took us to a station that was within short walking distance of our hotel.

Building an excellent metro system was one of the very few good things that the Communists did for Prague during their forty-odd years of running the country. There are three lines, their intersections forming a triangle in the heart of the city.

It was February – our 43rd anniversary! - and it was dark by the time we’d checked into our hotel. No matter: Prague is beautiful by night as well as by day. We made our way to what is perhaps its most famous landmark, the historic Charles Bridge, which is pedestrianized and crosses the main river, the Vltava. It is lined on both sides with statues of saints, thirty in all. It was a magical scene. On one of the hills before us were the splendidly illuminated Cathedral and Castle; on another was Prague’s mini-Eiffel Tower, the Observation Tower on Petrin Hill. Enhancing this scene were the old-fashioned gaslights, on the Bridge itself and in adjoining areas. 

We had worried a bit that Prague might have changed and become more commercialized but we need not have done. It is as beautiful as ever. Certainly in has become more ‘western’ and no more than in Paris or Rome is there a ‘communist’ feel. It remains too a very safe city. It is true that pickpocketing can happen but one is highly unlikely to encounter violent crime. Any bad behaviour is more likely to be from Britishers on stag dos than from locals. 

A decision to be taken was where to eat. Dining experiences on previous occasions had been varied. We had had very good but also very bad meals. One place was, unknowingly, pioneering the concept of fusion cooking: it was ostensibly an Indonesian Restaurant and on offer was a very curious blending of Central European and Southeast Asian cooking. We settled for our three evenings on a nearby Kolkovna, a chain of restaurants in Prague and also in Bratislava. It was atmospheric though the adjective ‘variable’ still comes to mind: their goulash soup was excellent, yet a main course of goulash was somewhat disappointing. As just about everywhere in the Czech Republic there were plenty of dumplings.

The following morning – it was Sunday – we went to an English language service at St Clement’s Anglican Episcopal Church. This had come to our attention when last year’s Radio Four Boxing Day, or one should say, since this is the Czech Republic, St Stephen’s Day, service was broadcast from there. The chaplain, Ricky, had extended an invitation to listeners to visit if ever they were in Prague. We decided to take him up on that. The Church is located just outside the main centre, close to Republic Square. 

We were made to feel very welcome and Ricky mentioned in his sermon that we had responded to the Radio Four invitation. He drew attention to the diversity in the congregation mentioning that the three readers had been of Irish, Tanzanian and South African origin. We afterwards joined the rest of the congregation for coffee, moving to a location just across the road. There a chap filled me in on the history. Like most buildings in Central Prague, it is centuries old, but only since the Velvet Revolution has it served as a church for the expat Anglican community. 

I have studied Czech history as part of both my BA and MA, something that has helped give me a love of the country. I remarked that, unlike Poland, the Czech Republic is not noted as a religious country. The Church played little part in the overthrow of communism, for example. The chap agreed and pointed out that the Catholic Church has great trouble finding enough Czechs to serve as priests, so much so that, in the north of the country, it brings in priests from Poland. I would surmise that this has something to do with the Thirty Years War. Yes, this occurred right back in the seventeenth century, but any student of history knows how long-term the effects of historical events can be (Chou en-Lai famously responded, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, that it was too soon to say!)

Bohemia had previously been independent and had been one of the first European countries to convert to Protestantism. An immediate result of the Thirty Years War was that it was finally absorbed into the Habsburg Empire at the same time being forcibly reCatholicized. The long-term result appears to be that though Catholicism still holds sway, allegiance is generally lukewarm.

This chap also told me that, though Independence Day is still a national holiday, it is not much celebrated for it seems to most people rather irrelevant, commemorating as it does the birth of a country, Czechoslovakia, that no longer exists. When the country split, the naming of the new entity was something of a problem for the Czechs though not, of course, for the Slovaks. Reviving ‘Bohemia’ was not an option since there is another historic Czech land, Moravia. ‘Bohemia and Moravia’ would have been something of a mouthful. The authorities fell back on ‘Czech Republic’, but somehow this lacks a strong feel of nationhood and I wonder if they would have done better to have bitten the bullet and invented a name that might have translated as ‘Czechia’ or ‘Czechland’.

Leaving the church and crossing Republic Square, we came to the Museum of Communism. Naturally, given my studies, this was of some interest. This is in fact an anti-Communist Museum. There is no pretence that it is an objective look at the experience of communism in Czechoslovakia. I’m comfortable with that! In any case it is a thoughtful exhibition, rigorous in its history and not at all polemical. It is well laid out, taking the visitor chronologically though the Communist period and its run up. There are all manner of memorabilia including a sports magazine that depicts, on its front page, a young Martina Navratilova, before she defected to the West. All ends happily with a video of the Velvet Revolution. With no doubt unintended irony, the Museum is above a McDonalds and alongside a casino, two products of westernization that one might rather regret. However I’d sooner have McDonalds the length and breadth of the land, with the odd casino thrown in, than live under the type of regime that governed Czechoslovakia for over forty years. 

On a previous visit we had done a Velvet Revolution Walk. This was interesting, and might have been more so had we not had a fairly useless guide. Things got off to an unpromising start when someone asked the young lady in question about the events leading up the Communist coup in 1948 and she responded that they were too painful for her to talk about. Er, hello... we have paid to go on a Velvet Revolution Walk, so want to learn about your country’s recent history. She did, though, point out various sights, a couple of which stay in the mind. One is the Kinsky Palace in Old Town Square, from the balcony of which the Communist leader, Klement Gottwald, harangued the crowd immediately after the coup. 42 years later to the day, President Havel stood in the same place to announce that the Communist era was over forever. 

The other was the hill in Letna Park, visible from both Old Town Square and Charles Bridge. Here a gigantic statue of Stalin was built. The Museum of Communism tells the story. A huge amount of work was involved with enormous granite slabs having to be hauled up to the site. The monument was finalized in 1955 – and one year later Khrushchev denounced Stalin! The satellite states followed suit with more or less enthusiasm – rather less in the case of Czechoslovakia – so there was no option but to demolish, again with much attendant difficulty, the painstakingly constructed monument. The Czech love of quirkiness has seen to it that, since the Velvet Revolution, a huge metronome now marks the site.

We had a wander along Wenceslas Square, which is not a Square at all but a broad boulevard. Great events, including the crushing of the Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution, have been played out here. There is a memorial to Jan Palach, the young student who set himself on fire in protest at the Soviet invasion. Close by is a statue of the Bohemian ruler whom we know as Good King Wenceslas. Wenceslas Square is in the quarter of the city known as the New Town. But newness in Prague is relative: it was founded in 1348! We moved on into the Old Town and the eponymous Square. This rivals St Mark’s as Europe’s most beautiful square, and is a couple of notches above Brussels’ Grand’ Place. As well as the aforementioned Kinsky Palace, it has a number of places of interest. Towering over the Square is the Church of Our Lady of Tyn, in my opinion second only to Salisbury Cathedral as the loveliest building in the world. There is the huge memorial of Jan Hus, who is a Czech national hero, a symbol of dissidence and of the fight against oppression. Born in 1370, he was a preacher who is sometimes described as a proto-Protestant; he was condemned for his beliefs by the Church of the day and burnt at the stake. Last but not least I will mention Old Town Hall Tower. This is above all known for the Astronomical Clock, but one can also climb the tower. This we now did, waiting a bit until it got really dark and thus enjoying a wonderful night-time view of the city.

On Monday, the second of our two full days, we mostly stayed west of the Vltava. First we got the funicular railway up Petrin Hill. We made our way to the Observation Tower. The lift being out of order, we had to leg it up the 299 steps but it was worth it for the magnificent view across the city. We wanted to spend time in Hradcany Quarter, named from the Castle or Hrad. There is a pleasant walk, which we had done a previous occasion, that would have brought us there following the Hunger Wall, so called because its construction in the 1360s gave work to the poor of the city at a time of famine. But time was not in plentiful supply so we went back down the funicular. We deviated to the other side of Charles Bridge in order to see Old Town Square by day and thus admire the sight of Our Lady of Tyn against the backdrop of a clear blue sky. On re-crossing the Bridge we continued through picturesque Mala Strana, the ‘Lesser Quarter’, then made the steep ascent to Hradcany. 

We purchased a ticket which gave us entry to the Cathedral and Castle and a couple of lesser known attractions. The huge St Vitus Cathedral, seat of the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Prague, is magnificent. So, in a quite different way, is Prague Castle. It was from here that the Kings of Bohemia ruled but, in Habsburg times, it was not needed for this purpose since the country was governed from Vienna. In recent years it has been the official home of the Presidents of Czechoslovakia and then the Czech Republic. During the Velvet Revolution one of the rallying cries was Havel nad Hrad or ‘Havel to the Castle’. He had taken up residence there by the end of 1989; in that single year he had gone from prisoner to President.

Among the sights are the massive Vladislav Hall, so constructed that Knights could take their horses into it via a staircase leading up from ground level. In an adjacent room is the window where the second Defenestration of Prague, which triggered the Thirty Years War, took place. Some nobles were pushed out of the window. They actually survived despite the steep drop. There are claims that this was a miracle but the reality might have been more mundane: they fell into a dung heap.

After our visits we spent a bit of time wandering round the Hradcany Quarter. A statue of TG Masaryk, the founding president of Czechoslovakia, presides benignly over the area. Needless to say this was only put up after the Velvet Revolution. He was one of the great statesmen of the twentieth century. Not only did he found a country, he kept it democratic when countries all around had succumbed to various forms of dictatorship, in the case of big neighbour Germany a peculiarly diabolical form. Mercifully he died in 1937 so didn’t live to see, the following year, the betrayal of Munich which was followed, as sure as night follows day, by Nazi occupation. His son Jan, on the other hand, lived to become, after World War II, the Foreign Secretary of Czechoslovakia, during that brief interval when there were hopes that the country would again be a democracy and serve as a bridge between East and West (rather as Finland actually did). He retained this role after the 1948 coup but, soon afterwards, the third Defenestration of Prague occurred. Jan Masaryk fell from a window of the nearby Foreign Ministry. Whether he jumped or was pushed has never been established.

There was one puzzlement. We could not find another of Hradcany’s major attractions, Golden Lane, a small street of fifteenth century houses which look as if they are straight out of the pages of a fairytale book. Eventually we realized why: renovation was in progress and access was barred. We lingered in Hradcany for a while, waiting for it to get dark so we could enjoy a night-time view of the city from on high. We made our way to the Strahov Monastery which lies at the far end of the Quarter. To our surprise, it was still open and we went inside. We soon realized why: a service was about to start. We stayed for the first part. It was a lovely spectacle but the service, unsurprisingly, was in Czech and we did not stay for the whole thing.

We returned home the next day but, as it was a late afternoon flight, there was more time to explore. We headed for Josefov, the former Jewish quarter, which is named from the enlightened Emperor Joseph, who emancipated the Jews in the Habsburg Lands. Tragically, nearly all of its inhabitants died at the hands of the Nazis who, had they had their wicked way, would have preserved Josefov as a memorial to an extinct race. On a previous visit we had gone inside the Pinkas Synagogue and were rather hoping to do so today. There is a wall bearing the names of all the Czech Jews who died in the Holocaust, a total of 77,297. This was bricked up by the Communist authorities after Czechoslovakia and other Eastern Bloc states broke off diplomatic relations with Israel in the sixties. When we visited the names were being laboriously uncovered; one could buy a brick and naturally we did. We wanted to see the finished work.

It transpired, though, that one cannot separately visit Pinkas Synagogue, for one must purchase a ticket covering several other historic sites in Josefov. We didn’t have the time or the money, since we had run down our currency and they wouldn’t accept credit cards. We are not planning for this to be our last ever visit to Prague, so hopefully we will get to revisit the Synagogue yet. We contented ourselves with a last wander around the Old Town and were fortunate enough to come upon the Astronomical Clock just as it was about to strike.

We also stumbled upon the hitherto unvisited Bethlehem Chapel, where funds were sufficient to gain us entry. It was a good discovery. Jan Hus used to preach there and there is an exhibition devoted to his life. The Church was actually restored by the Communist regime. That sounds counter-intuitive but communist regimes, perhaps aware deep down of their illegitimacy, did sometimes adopt as their own great national heroes from the past. In East Berlin, for example, the authorities thought better of their decision to pull down the Statue of Frederick the Great so they re-erected it!

It really was time now to bring our time in Prague to an end. Regretfully we made our way back through Old Town Square and across Charles Bridge to our hotel. We returned to the airport as we had come, by metro and bus.

First published in VISA 98-99 (August-October 2011)