We arrived in Prague midday on Saturday. It’s a small city with a lot of historical buildings which are still in tact. The Jewish section is especially well preserved because it is rumored that Hitler wanted to maintain it as a “Museum to an Extinct Exotic Race.” This means the city suffered very little damage during either world war. It has been used as a movie set for scenes from old European cities (“Amadeus” was filmed there). Most of the streets are narrow and windy. The center is very touristy, as was the area near the castle, where I saw (horror of all horrors) an Ed Hardy store.
As soon as we arrived, I dumped my stuff at the hostel and went up to Prague Castle. The complex is from the 9-10th Century and is still in use today as the official residence of the Czech president. As soon as I got there, I went inside St. Vitus Cathedral, a gothic structure with colorful stained- and painted-glass windows. Jess had told me to look for a stained-glass window by Czech illustrator Alfons Mucha. I had some trouble figuring out which one it was and, in the end, wound up taking pictures of most of the windows and having Jess ID it later. The church itself was probably one of the top-five nicest churches I’ve been to. The windows were brilliantly colored and it had a huge tomb in the back. I especially liked a spiral staircase leading up to the second level (above a side-chapel). It was carved with a vine over it.
As I was waiting to get into the church it was drizzling. That slowed down as I left the church and headed toward the Old Royal Palace where I entered at the Vladislav Hall, a large space with arched ceilings. The Palace itself wasn’t that interesting, as there wasn’t much to see inside. I could only visit a four rooms and a chapel. I did really like the Basilica of St. George. It was a small-ish church, connected to a cloisters that I could not visit. The church had some frescoes on the apse, but my favorite part was the stairs. The altar was raised above the crypt and on either side a large (for the space) staircase gave you the option of going up (to the altar) or down (to the crypt). It was like a staircase you wound find in an entrance foyer of a large house, but this one over-filled the space and was in a church.
The last place I visited inside the castle grounds was Golden Lane. In the 16th century, tradesmen lived in tiny houses in the castle’s wall. Above the houses you can walk down a hallway the castle guards used as a lookout. The houses themselves are really tiny. I fit through all the doorways, but many people did not. The rooms inside were about the size of a Tufts single, some as large as a double. The houses are used as souvenir shops today; I browsed around, but nothing was worth buying.
Leaving the castle, I walked down and crossed the river to the Staromestske nam, the square in Prague’s old town. The square is bordered by buildings and churches, which are as old as the 14th century. At one end is the Old Town Hall where an astronomical clock (it’s a partial replica) from 1410 stands. It’s large and chimes on the hour (apparently apostles parade out of the top of it, but I never saw it). In the center of the square sits a statue to Jan Hus, a religious reformer of the 15th century.
Back at the hostel, I made rice and a mock red-curry for dinner (broccoli and carrots in tomato sauce with curry). Our hostel was one of the nicer ones we’ve encountered. Jess and I both got bottom bunks in a room overlooking a plaza. Our room had three (!!!) windows and, therefore, a cross-breeze. The hostel also had a full kitchen and wifi.
Sunday I woke up and took a free walking tour of Prague. (Jess had been to Prague before and didn’t really want/need to do the touristy stuff.) The tour guide was from Colorado and had only been living in Prague for two months. She’s there to teach English. We started in the old town square and moved on to see a church where an arm hangs. Legend has it that a man was trying to steel from the church. As punishment his arm was cut off and left hanging to remind others not to steel. Pretty much it looked like a brown dog bone 20 feet in the air hanging from a small chain.
Next we walked through the Jewish quarter and saw the cemetery from the outside. Then we walked across the Charles Bridge, which has statues lining the sides of it. These are all plaster casts because the originals won’t survive the elements. The statues are mostly of saints and the bridge was crowded with tourists and people selling things. On the other side of the bridge, we visited a small, man-made island. Prague floods every few years and some times this island is completely submerged. A restaurant marks the water level of the various floods. A few years ago, the entire first floor of every building was flooded. From here we saw a wall where people sprayed their opinions of communism and love on a wall. During the 80s, a Mexican university student painted “All we need is love” onto the wall and kept painting it after the police painted over the graffiti. The idea lasted (even though communism did not) and people still spray-paint messages of love onto this wall. The tour ended up at the castle.
I walked back down the hill and to the old part of the city where I went to the Jewish Museum, which is actually a series of buildings. The first one I entered was the Pinkas Synagogue from 1535. The walls have been painted with the names of 80,000 Jews from Moravia and Bohemia who died during the Holocaust. These names are arranged by location and are all over the main part and women’s gallery. Upstairs there was an exhibition of art work by children who lived in Terezín before being moved to the concentration camps. Their teacher, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, kept their work in a turn and it was discovered, preserved and donated to the museum. Next, I went through the Old Jewish Cemetery which was established in the 15th century. It has almost 12,000 tombstones, but more people are buried there without markers. The stones are literally smashed up against one another. Because space was at a premium, and the Jews were not given many other areas, people were buried in layers. The ground at the cemetery is actually slightly higher than the streets around it. The oldest grave is from 1439, but it was really hard to even tell that the rock I saw was marking a grave. There were some tombs in the walls of the cemetery, but most of the people had been buried “underground.” After the cemetery, I went to the Ceremonial Hall, a building used by the Prague Burial Society. Inside I encountered an exhibition about death in the Jewish religion as well as objects used by the society, including tableware from their annual banquet. It was believed that their job was so depressing that they deserved a yearly break.
Next, I visited the Klausen Synagogue, which was the result of taking three smaller buildings and turning them into one larger space. The space was set up as museum on Jewish traditions and they had installed a bimah with a torah in a glass case to show how it would look during services. This synagogue was built in the 1600s and was the largest in the ghetto. The third synagogue I visited was the Maisel Synagogue. This one was dedicated to the history of Jews in Moravia and Bohemia. The building was built in 1590-2 and had three naves. It was much squarer than the previous two synagogues I had been inside. It too had the arc symbolically set up, but no bimah. I saved the Spanish Synagogue for last because I knew it was the most opulent of the four. It was in the baroque style and housed an exhibit on the history of Jews in Moravia and Bohemia from emancipation to the present. It also had a room full of torah-pointers and other old silver objects. I liked the set-up of the museum, that you had to walk between the spaces, but the actually cases were dark and there was tons of text in each. The Berlin museum was much better in that the exhibitions included hands-on elements and the lighting made it easy to see everything.
I walked through the newer part of Prague, up to Wenceslas Square, where I saw a statue of him on a horse. Wenceslas was known as the “good king” and he is well loved in Prague. I stopped at Tesco for some groceries and wanted to pay with my ATM card because I only had enough Czech crown/krona to get to the airport the next day. The card machines weren’t working and I asked if I could pay with euros. I only had a 20-euro note and was spending the Czech equivalent of one euro. While I was trying to explain to the woman that I could pay her with euro, but I wanted euro back as change the man behind me paid for my groceries. I was shocked and embarrassed but he said, “ah, no problem. You can pay next time.”
That evening, I went on a mini-excursion to DM (a combo CVS/health food store) for wheat-free pretzels. Jess had found the store and told me where to go. On the way, I got turned around in this gallery and wound up encountering a statue of Wenceslas on an upside horse which was suspended from the ceiling. I had known about the statue because it is by the same artist who put statues of babies on the TV tower in the city. From far away, they don’t really look like babies, but Jess had know about it and told me.
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