Prague: world city

PragueFrom Dresden, we went by train to Prague. After Germany, it was a bit of a shock. Within minutes of arrival we had been ripped of by both the forex desk and the taxi drivers. We were driven through some seedy looking streets to a rather seedy-looking apartment. After a week of Germany, it felt that we had been dropped straight into the Third World.

Some of this was just lack of acclimatisation. The apartments soon looked characterful rather than seedy, being in a genuinely old building. And it had functional wifi, unlike both of our otherwise highly functional German apartments. Prague is not remotely German. The streets are untidy, but they were also bursting with life. It seemed like you could buy anything. Sex shops were common, and the food shops seemed to devote most of their space to booze.

Tourists were everywhere. The locals did not even attempt to speak Czech – and I’m afraid I didn’t either, not even a thank you in the local language, which I usually manage. Visitors crowded around the various outstanding tourist favourites: Charles Bridge, the Castle, and the Old Town Square. Beyond these they seemed more interested in eating, drinking, shopping and having fun, rather than taking in their astonishing surroundings.

Prague’s buildings escaped serious damage in the war, unlike Germany’s (or Poland’s, Hungary’s or Russia’s, to name a few). The Communists did not have the resources to do mass redevelopment. The result is that the city is left with a huge variety of old buildings. These cover a very wide range of dates. There are the medieval gates, and the 16th, 17th and 18th century churches and palaces. But also there are a lot of 19th century buildings, including many Art Nouveau ones from the late 19th and early 20th century. The sheer extent of these old buildings is breathtaking. Before the war, Prague was one of many beautiful old European cities. Now it gives you an idea of how much has been lost in that orgy of destruction.

Unlike the buildings, the people were not so lucky. The Nazi occupation was brutal, especially after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in the city in 1942. Prague synagogueThe previously flourishing Jewish community was mostly murdered or driven out. Quite by accident we found the Jerusalem Synagogue. We could not resist going in, where we found a display on the history of the Jewish community after the war. We need to remember that the persecution of Jews, up to and including further murders, did not end with the war. This was especially if they tried to reclaim their property. The idea that one of history’s great wrongs had been done to the Jewish people was slow to develop. The Communists continued to discriminate against Jews right up to the liberation. It may be that without the central focus provided by the Zionists and Israel the Holocaust would have been lost amid the many other appalling acts of the 20th Century. Though we gentile Europeans draw a rather different lesson from that crime than do the Zionists, they were right to raise our consciousness of it, and it has shaped the way we view ourselves and the world profoundly.

So Prague is a treasure trove of old buildings and artefacts from a lost age. But, like so many other European cities, it also reminds us of our chequered past. It deserves to be one of the most visited cities in the world. Perhaps it’s a shame that so many of them are more interested in shopping, sex and booze than in history – but maybe their money helps keep the memories alive.

2 thoughts on “Prague: world city”

  1. Prague is not the only Czech city whose centre is preserved. Olomouc, Karlovy Vary and Cheb for instance, which I have visited. If you go by car, you discover the planning principle – you drive for miles through very realistic industrial/towerblock urbanisation, before you reach the cobblestoned treasure at the centre.

    My guess is that the preservation of these centres is not only due to lack of money. I feel that the Czechs are a fairy-tale people, somehow more linked to Austria than Poland.

    In Prague you don’t have to go far to find the more realistic. Even a trip to the National Gallery (a pre-communist functionalist building) starts you on the journey.

    For me the most striking thing about the centre of Prague is the way tourism creates a special kind of bubble. Tourists go abroad, but end up seeing their own reflection. I suppose that’s what they want, otherwise they would be more adventurous.

    But tourists traps are always built around something, and it’s certainly hard to dwarf the old architecture of Prague. How long do you think it will be before a town built in the 1970’s becomes a tourist attraction?

    1. Well it may be a few centuries before 1970s becomes a tourist magnet…

      I wonder if becoming a tourist attraction drains a site of its power and meaning. That could be said of the Mona Lisa, for example. Not always, I suppose, is the answer.

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