PRAGUE

Have I left visiting Prague too late? While not as disneyfied as Dubrovnik, it still feels like a tourist town where all the locals have sensibly gone away for the summer holidays. A good example is that there isn’t a food shop to found in the area we’re living in (the Jewish Quarter) or even the more extended places we’re exploring. Just endless mini-marts selling alcohol, water, and tourist tat. 

Ann on the Charles Bridge

Have I failed to give enough time to explore Prague? It is full of architectural and cultural treasures - churches and synagogues, bridges and towers, palaces and theatres, museums and town halls. Each deserves half a day at least and we only have 5 days here. Even the clocks are fascinating. For example, a Hebrew clock which goes in the opposite direction to ours and an extraordinary astronomical clock on the Old Town Hall with an astrolabe that demonstrates four different types of measuring time as well as a painted panel that tells you the Saint for every day. Any serious student of Prague would stay here for months. 

Astronomical Clock

One of the guide books I read said that Prague is like an illustrated storybook. “To the detriment of its stories …its illustrations are so impressive that many people quickly flip through the book and let themselves be carried away by the flood of lines, shapes, and colours on every page.” After the first day, that was exactly how I felt - brief glimpses of all sorts of marvels but no connection to any of them. 

Have I left visiting Prague too late because I’m too old to spend all day walking these historic streets? Well, it’s not really about age but rather more about infirmity. Wandering around an historic city with a fractured knee and a fractured foot isn’t the easiest of tasks. One wants to be looking up at the romanesque or the gothic or the baroque or the rococo or the cubist buildings rather than forever focusing on not tripping over the cobblestones. Given my injuries I’m proud that I’ve been able to stay out exploring during the day for about 5km/5hours but it’s not nearly as much as I would have been able to do last year. 

Although the Jewish Quarter has a number of synagogues, the Jewish population of Prague is tiny. There are more people of Vietnamese origin (who came here is guest labourers and students in the late 20th Century) and certainly more Jewish people in the old cemeteries than on the street. There isn’t nearly as much security around the synagogues as you’d see in Australia and although there are restaurants with pro-Israeli signage, there doesn’t seem to have been the same level of community angst about Gaza that Australia has seen. Perhaps the Golem is keeping the community safe. Formed out of clay from the River Vltava which runs through the centre of Prague, it was made by a 16th century Rabbi and now supposedly lives out of harm’s way to in the quaintly named Old-New Synagogue, just around the corner from where we are staying. 

Another figure that haunts old Prague is Franz Kafka. His father’s haberdashery shop was on the Old Town Square and in half a dozen spots around the square is one of the many apartment where he lived. He wrote in the Golden Lane in the Prague Castle precinct and his statue is next to the deliciously Moorish Spanish Synagogue. However, whenever his name was mentioned, Susan and I seemed to be the only people who knew who he was although I had to confess that I’d never finished any of his books.

Charles Kafka memorial

What I didn’t know is that INXS filmed a video of their song ‘Never tear us apart’ in and around our neighbourhood including in the old Jewish cemeteries in the 1980s, before the Velvet Revolution. If you want to check the ambience of the city it’s worth chasing it up on YouTube. 

Given that this country was one of the first to be invaded by Germany during World War II, Prague didn’t suffer much from allied bombing which is why so many of its historic neighbourhoods remain intact. However, some rather confused American pilots managed to miss Dresden during the fire bombing of that city and accidentally bombed Prague instead. In those days, the USA was good to its allies and did pay reparations. 

As well as having all those historic buildings it also has modern touches and my favourite is the Dancing House designed by Frank Geary and Vlado Milunic as a monument to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Brilliant conceit. I’m not a fan of 20th century architecture but the truly quirky and original always appeals. 

The first person I met from this part of world was in the 1960s. There was a trade exhibition from different countries on at the Perth Showgrounds and for some reason (educational?) the family went. In her inimitable way, Betty took the Czechoslovakian trade representative under wing and invited him home for dinner. I can just imagine her thinking - he’s far from his family, he’s a communist and so not really welcome here but we’ll look after him. He came with gifts and I can still remember the minature green manicure set I received and the colourful magazines about the joys of communism that I cut up for school projects. Alan and Betty wrote to him for a while but after the Soviet crack down in 1968, all communication ceased. 

We asked the charming Tomas, our guide on a food tasting tour of the Vinohrady area of the city, what the attitude towards Russians was these days and he said it’s been bad since the invasion. And he didn’t mean the invasion of Ukraine but rather 1968 - and he wasn’t even born then. Another delightful woman we met, Welsh-Morrocan married to a Czech diplomat, said that her husband told her to stop speaking Czech because she was doing it with a Russian accent, a language she’d leant first, and that wouldn’t be viewed well. What was that line from the Reader’s Digest all those years ago about the 68 invasion - “you can choose your friends but not your relatives” (i.e. a reference to the supposed ‘fraternal’ relationship between the USSR and it’s Eastern European satellites. 

As well as exploring the city via foot and via tram and via river boat, we have done some tours - of the Old Town, of the Castle, of St Vitus’s Cathedral (which took 600 years to complete and where the 20th century architects (rather cheekily in my view) had their own busts carved onto the facade) and as mentioned, of the food and wine of the country. The tastes of the latter ran from poppyseed Kolach or wheel cake (a round brioche-style bun with a filling) to svickova na smetane (beef in a sweet sauce with a cranberry cream topping served with bread dumplings), with tastes of mlika beer (were the initial pour looks like 90% froth) to Moravian Riesling. Not every aspect of Czech cuisine is to my taste but food tours are a great way of seeing how the locals live. And if you’re looking for a guide, I can highly recommend Tomas: YUMMY PRAGUE TOUR | Private Food Tour in English and Deutsch Prague 

Susan trying Mlika beer

Probably, the most unusual things we did was to eat at a Georgian restaurant replete with an older gentleman in all white singing Tom-Jones style songs and visiting a cat cafe, Sebastian’s birthday present for Susan. 

Prague Cat Cafe

We had some hot days in Prague but clearly they don’t have the same water challenges that Australian cities often face. In order to cool the cobblestones, fire engines drive around spraying water onto the streets and the people. It’s hard to imagine what the city will look like in few months time with Christmas markets and snow storms. What fascinates me is that many of the apartment and office buildings were created in the late 19th/early 20th centuries - in other words around the same time that Melbourne was taking off. If are forefathers hadn’t been so enamoured of us living on quarter acre blocks, perhaps Melbourne would have looked like Prague with trams dominating a city of architecturally interesting office and apartment buildings albeit without quite so many spires and bridges. 

Susan in the Old Town Square