PRAGUE, Czech Republic — “Prague,” native son Franz Kafka famously said, “is a dear little mother with claws.” Well, she sinks her claws into me on my first afternoon, spent following the sunlight along the Vltava River flowing through the capital. One moment the rays are tangoing up and down Frank Gehry’s daring new Dancing House - nicknamed Ginger and Fred - and the next they’re turning Baroque facades a mouthwatering shade of butter.
Along the 16 sandstone arches of the medieval Charles Bridge, the sun illumines statues that have lined this link between Right and Left Banks for centuries.
Late rays settle as a benediction upon the spires of Prague Castle, a citadel of churchly and princely power high above the city for a millennium.
Prague is a rare gem among European cities, its historic core unbombed in either World War. A thousand years of history and architecture are mine for the exploring. For the cost of a $1 metro or tram ticket, I can zoom from St. George’s Basilica in Prague Castle, a simple Romanesque shrine from 920, to Gehry’s showstopper in half an hour.
“Prague is the most welcoming city in Europe,” guide Milos Curick boasts of his hometown. “Not because of the people, but because it’s very compact, very intimate, with human proportions. There is the possibility to walk everywhere.”
Ah, the walking; I’m clocking eight to 10 hours at a crack, without ever retracing a step. Through thetwisting medieval lanes of Old Town and along the later grid of New Town - new in 1348, that is. No city rewards aimless wandering and the fine art of getting lost like Prague. But if you’d like to see your hotel again in this lifetime, I’d recommend carrying a business card with its Czech name and address and a very good map.
Curick may not find his fellow residents Europe’s most welcoming, but give or take a surly ticket taker or two, Praguers were unfailingly helpful and encouraging to a stranger trying to cope with their language.
Prague will not pander to Anglophones, so its mapsand signs are exclusively Czech, with a few tourist pictograms tossed in. Newer museums, such as those for favorite sons Kafka and the artist Alphonse Mucha, have bilingual displays, and of course, younger Czechs all study English in school. Lost? Ask one of the city’s thousands of college students.
The Kafka Museum on the Left Bank may be a good place to start, a moody, unsettling experience that mirrors the tone of Kafka’s work. Yes, there are old photos and old films of the Jewish Quarter he knew, but the photos are seen at the bottom of a stream, and the films are distorted with waves and prismatic breaks. The sound of dripping water percolates through the dark chambers.
Much sunnier, in every possible way, is the Mucha Museum across town. This giant of art nouveau never met a beautiful woman, an unfurling lily or a Moravian folk motif he didn’t like.
His 1894 theater poster for Parisian actress Sarah Bernhardt made him famous overnight, with people sneaking out to razor them off billboards and take them home. The bright, vaulted rooms of the Kaunicky Palace suit his work perfectly.
MAD ABOUT MUCHA
Mucha pops up all over Prague. If you’d like to see his art in situ, take the official tour of the Municipal House. Everyone agrees this is a terrible name for such a brilliant art nouveau gem, but once you’re admiring Mucha’s frescoes in the Lord Mayor’s office and sipping strong Turkish coffee in the cafe, you’ll forget all about thename.
Mucha was a passionate nationalist, creating the new Czech bank notes, stamps and medals when Czechoslovakia finally broke free of Austro-Hungarian control and created a new nation on Oct. 28, 1918. The date is no coincidence - that’s the birthday of Wenceslas, patron saint of the Czech Republic.
Christmas carolers know him as “Good King Wenceslas,” but “he was never king,” Curick corrects, “because he died in 929 or 935. We didn’t have a king until 1085. How good he was I’m not really certain.”
Nonetheless, he and his steed stand proudly before the National Museum, looking out to the square that bears his name. The former horse market is now a long boulevard of shops, restaurants and hotels.
“Wenceslas Square has witnessed some of the most important events in our country,” Curick said. “In the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, there was a movement for democratization within the oneparty system,” the Communists who had taken control in 1948. “In August, the tanks crushed it.”
During the Velvet Revolution of 1989, “hundreds of students were brutally beaten, but luckily nobody died,”Curick said. “The country opened up and we had a functioning democracy.” ART EVERYWHERE
History is ever-palpable in Prague, from the brilliant stained glass in St. Vitus’ Cathedral, 585 years in the building, to the John Lennon Wall in Lesser Town, the first memorial to spring up after the songwriter’s 1980 murder. “Bring your paints,” Curick urges, “and imagine worldpeace.”
After four decades of socialism, Praguers have certainly got the hang of capitalism. There’s a fee for everything, from museum admissions and photo fees to public toilets. A day’s entrance fees can easily equal a day’s dining budget.
One of the most expensive - and priceless - admissions is to the five Jewish synagogues that memorialize the once-vibrant community wiped out by the Nazis. ThePinchas Synagogue is especially poignant, its walls inscribed with the names of 80,000 Jews transported to Terezin concentration camp, about an hour away. They died there or later in Poland’s Auschwitz.
The children of Terezin, under the direction of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, made art to express what they were going through. When she was sent to her death at Auschwitz, Dicker-Brandeis left behind 4,000 drawings in two suitcases, and a selection is shown at Pinchas. “This was the first Holocaust memorial in the world,” Curick said.
Outside Pinchas, the jumble of 12,000 headstones in the Old Jewish Cemetery marks every Jewish death in the city from the 15th century through 1787. On a gray, drizzly day, the sky matches the pewter shade of the old stones.
SYNAGOGUE SURVIVOR
Nearby, the mood changes from somber remembrance to a celebration of survival. The Staranova Synagogue, from 1270, is Europe’s oldest still functioning as a Jewish house of worship. The little Gothic building has its original carvings of grapevines over a door, each of the 12 clusters representing one of the 12 tribes of Israel. Twelve stained-glass windows illuminate the sanctuary. How can this be, with the Nazis occupying Prague from March 15, 1939, until the last bitter days of the war?
“The Nazis were going to make this into a museum of an extinct people,” said synagogue guide Martin Janocek. “From the beginning they were bringing things to this synagogue to display.”
After such a morning, I need a coffee. I follow the hiss of the cappuccino machine and its fabulous fumes to the Grand Cafe Orient, a reopened jewel box within the world’s first Cubist house.
The House at the Black Madonna, following the medieval system of house signs for an illiterate populace, holds the Cubism museum and the Kubista store with authorized, handmade reproductions. The Czechs took Picasso’s Cubist ideas and ran with them.
Upstairs, the Grand Cafe Orient re-creates the cafe of nearly a century ago, with Cubist chandeliers, coat hooks - even the tortes have Cubist decorations.
Ragtime plays on the music system and a young waiter shimmies back to his station, dancing in syncopation to the music of his great-greatgrandparents. It’s nothing he’d download to his iPod, for sure, but like most of his fellow residents, he’s happy to enjoy a bit of bygone rhythm as one sliver of Prague’s 1,000-year past.
For more information, check out CzechTourism.com.
(Betsa Marsh is a Lowell Thomas Award winner from the Society of American Travel Writers. She covers the world at Globespinners.com and at BritainontheCheap.com.)
Travel, Pages 58 on 11/21/2010