Prague/Prag/Praha

Last Friday we again made our way to the train station (it's feeling more familiar now) and this time headed for Prague (which has different names in English, German, and Czech, as indicated above). The train connections to Prague are less than ideal--there's a quick train east to Linz, then we transferred to a slow local that goes north to Summerau on the Austrian-Czech border, then we transferred again to another slow local that took us to Ceske Budejovice, a fair-sized town (and the city where Budweiser beer originated , or so we've read).

The slow trains gave us plenty of time to view the countryside--rolling rather than mountainous, once we got a little way from Salzburg--and remember the things we forgot. The two most significant were the camera (all photos here are borrowed!) and the papers showing that we'd paid for our discount rail passes, which two different conductors asked us for. One got quite irked when we couldn't produce them, but eventually he stomped off without making us pay full fare, for which we were grateful.

Once into the Czech Republic we saw the level of maintenance and paint on the houses, train stations, and so forth change quickly. Some towns and houses looked quite prosperous, but there were also signs of people living without very much, and some of the stations looked like they had been decaying, gently or not, for several decades.

We finally got into Prague--which is a big city, over a million people--at around 4:00, and found our way out of the rather vast and gloomy Soviet-era train station (M. managed to sniff out an ATM where we could get some Czech crowns). She also had found us a room at the Pension Accord, a small but nice enough place very close to the Old Square on Rybna Street. Just around the corner is Masna Street, where Franz Kafka went to German school as a young boy. One of the scenes we passed on the way to the hotel was this street, with the Art Nouveau Municipal Hall and the very old "Powder Tower" next to each other.

One of the main centers of Prague is the Old Square, which has a big statue of Jan Hus (sort of the 15th-century Martin Luther of the Czechs, though he ended up getting killed by the Catholics) and several big churches and other fancy buildings. We wandered around town for awhile, had some allegedly authentic and definitely tasty food in one of the hundreds of restaurants, walked around some more in the evening, including a trek across the Charles Bridge, which has various statues (most of them Catholic) at intervals along the way. You can see the Hus statue and the Tyn Church, which was Hussite for a century or so, in this photo.



And I will add one of the bridge too. (It's usually crammed with tourists and rather ticky-tacky souvenir stands, but it's the way to get from the Old Quarter to the Castle Quarter across the river, so we walked it several times.








From the bridge we saw a sign saying "Kafka Museum," so we decided to check that out. It was closed for the night by the time we found it, but we did enjoy the little crowd in the courtyard outside, where there's a fountain with two, um, anatomically correct male statues who keep the water circulating (and parts of them move as well). Lots of photos were being taken. I was sort of glad to have forgotten the camera.

The next day we walked a few blocks from the hotel to find the restaurant where we were supposed to get our free breakfast. Sure enough, there it was, on a street with a lot of market shops set up. We bought some decorated Easter eggs for our landlady (to replace the ones on the Easter tree she set up in our bedroom that we knocked off and broke) but mostly resisted otherwise.

We saw Wenceslas Square (yes, Good King Wenceslas is a Czech folk hero). The square (really a long boulevard) is where Soviet tanks came to crush the Prague Spring uprising in 1968 (you can see the light-colored patches in the columns at the National Museum where the workmen filled in the bullet holes). It was also the central site of the 1989 movement that was called the Velvet Revolution, because they managed to win their independence without a shot being fired. We saw the balcony of the Hotel Europa where Vaclav Havel, Alexander Dubcek, and some others spoke to huge crowds (a rock star loaned his sound system for the occasion).

We learned later that Kafka once did a reading at the Hotel Europa as well. You run into his name and image all over Prague--we saw a number of buildings where he lived, went to school, hung out with literary friends, etc. We also went back to the museum, which was excellent and somewhat disturbing (only right for Kafka!), and bought one of his books at a bookstore which is on the Old Town Square in the same rooms where Kafka's father had a dry goods store.

We also went through the Alphonse Mucha Museum. He's one of those artists whose name I didn't recognize, but whose work looked really familiar once we saw it. He was one of the leaders of the Art Nouveau movement, and was especially famous for a series of posters advertising plays with Sarah Bernhardt, the French actress, in them. He also was really interested in Czech nationalism, and helped to build support for the movement that led to the Czechs becoming independent of Austria-Hungary in 1918 or so. (We're learning all sorts of things about the history of central Europe on this trip!

Literary footnote: I reread Willa Cather's My Antonia on the train, because I'm teaching it soon. It takes place mostly in Nebraska toward the end of the 19th century. One of the minor characters is an Austrian immigrant, and Antonia and her family are Bohemians from what's now the Czech Republic. At one point the Austrian guy says that he'd give the Bohemians some advice about their getting adjusted to life in America, but there's no use, because Bohemians just don't trust Austrians . . . and now I understand why!

The "Little Quarter" across the river and to the South has some nice cafes and parks, but we wandered into it mainly in search of the wall where the Czechs remember John Lennon as an inspiration for peace and freedom. In true Kafkaesque fashion we went round and round, unable to find it, but then when we'd pretty much given up in disgust and were just trying to make our way over to the Castle Quarter, all of a sudden there it was, complete with some kids (apparently Americans) who had cans of paint and brushes and were adding a new layer of graffiti to the many layers already there. Give peace a chance.

Soon we did go on and climbed the hill to the Castle Quarter, which more or less dominates the skyline--there's a huge castle complex and a grand Gothic cathedral right in the middle of it. Unfortunately the Old Palace was closed for some reason, so we didn't get to see the room where the semi-famous "Defenestration of Prague" took place. In 1618 or thereabouts the Czechs got upset with the way that the Germans were treating them, and threw two German ambassadors out a window (thus "defenstration"--"Fenster" is "window" in German). They landed in some horse manure and survived, but the incident sparked the awful Thirty Years War, so I suppose I shouldn't find the name or the event so amusing.

The "Golden Lane" is a narrow street with a bunch of tiny shops/houses where goldsmiths used to work. It was also called the "Street of Alchemists," and for a little while Kafka used one of the houses as a studio, when the noise of his family's apartment got to be too much for him. Today the street's flooded with tourists most of the time, and not exactly quiet. But Kafka's gone, too.

The cathedral includes the tomb of King Wenceslas himself, though you can only look into the room from the doorway, since the wallpaper is encrusted with semi-precious stones. Go figure. There's also a dramatic woodcut of Protestant iconoclasts breaking up images in the cathedral during their brief rebellion. And it's obvious from the many, many images (including one tomb that's said to have a whole ton of silver in it) that the Catholics eventually triumphed. At least until the Communists arrived . . . but now it's hard to say just what's what, from a brief visit. Many of the big churches seem to function as concert halls most of the time . . .

Along those lines, on Sunday morning we heard a beautiful organ concert at a church just around the corner from our hotel. (We decided that it had been enough of a sacramental experience that, as good Anabaptists, we could slip out before Mass). We went to the Jewish Quarter, where we toured the exhibits at the old Spanish Synagogue and walked through the Old Cemetery. (The Jewish community in Prague was large and vital for a long time, though it was largely wiped out by the Nazis and today there are only a few thousand left.) Things were often difficult, though. For several centuries, up into the 18th, there was only this one small graveyard where Jews in Prague could be buried. Their own rules said that graves couldn't be moved once people had been buried, so they buried people one on top of another, putting a thin layer of dirt in between, and moving the gravestones up until they're crowded right next to each other. Among the famous people who are buried there is a Rabbi Loew who, according to legend, created the "golem" out of clay who then came to life to defend the ghetto when it was threatened by one of the periodic pogroms. The golem himself is supposed to be hidden in the attic of the famous Old-New Synagogue, but we didn't get up there to check it out.

We didn't see everything there was to see in the Jewish Quarter--or anywhere else--but it was time to get to the train. So we had some lunch, spent most of our remaining Czech crowns on cheese, bread, and chocolate for dinner on the train, stopped by the hotel to pick up our bags, trudged back to the station, and watched scenery, read, drowsed, and ate our way through a somewhat tedious but not difficult train trip. We arrived back in Salzburg an hour and more behind schedule--something we hardly thought possible on the Austrian train system!--but got the last bus to the center of town and found a taxi there which brought us quickly to our door for only ten euros.

This weekend we'll be staying closer to home, resting up and saving our euros for the next big trip, but we hope to take the bus to the lake country east of Salzburg if we get a nice day.