I finally made it to Prague last weekend. I've been meaning to go for ages, and a long weekend in June seemed like the perfect opportunity. I walked all the miles and saw all the things and had an excellent time. On the train home I started compiling a mental list of things to share.
First, a linguistic thing: plural nouns in Czech often have a 'y' at the end. I saw a lot of signs advertising filmy, gifty, and suvenýry. This made me giggle.
Second, a delicious thing: Svíčková. Sirloin in cream sauce with dumplings, a taste of whipped cream, and a sprinkling of cranberries. I had this my first night in Prague, and the only problem with it was that it was about half the size I wanted it to be. Walking all the miles makes a girl hungry. Seriously, it was so good I think I will have to learn to cook it myself.
A thing that was super cool: you know Good King Wenceslas? The one who looked down upon the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay on the ground, deep and crisp and even? This is his grave.
Second, a delicious thing: Svíčková. Sirloin in cream sauce with dumplings, a taste of whipped cream, and a sprinkling of cranberries. I had this my first night in Prague, and the only problem with it was that it was about half the size I wanted it to be. Walking all the miles makes a girl hungry. Seriously, it was so good I think I will have to learn to cook it myself.
A thing that was super cool: you know Good King Wenceslas? The one who looked down upon the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay on the ground, deep and crisp and even? This is his grave.
It sits in St. Vitus Cathedral, up at Prague Castle. Czech kings used to be crowned in the Wenceslas Chapel, back in the day. I had no idea he was a real person.
Another thing that was super cool: Sunday morning before catching the train home, I visited the Klementinum, the national library built by the Jesuits in the 1700s. According to the tour guide, the founders declared that while it's possible to have a seminary without a chapel, you cannot have a university without a library. My favourite part of the old main library room was the magic square on the beautifully-decorated ceiling. My Dad taught me the trick for completing any magic square with an odd number of squares per side. Apparently, this is the oldest known depiction of that particular puzzle. (Picture below: view from the Klementinum tower.)
Another thing that was super cool: Sunday morning before catching the train home, I visited the Klementinum, the national library built by the Jesuits in the 1700s. According to the tour guide, the founders declared that while it's possible to have a seminary without a chapel, you cannot have a university without a library. My favourite part of the old main library room was the magic square on the beautifully-decorated ceiling. My Dad taught me the trick for completing any magic square with an odd number of squares per side. Apparently, this is the oldest known depiction of that particular puzzle. (Picture below: view from the Klementinum tower.)
A thing that set off my research bells: there is a chapel on the ground floor of the Klementinum, and that was super cool too. It is just used for concerts these days. There are two organs - the original one from the early 18th century, which is up in the choir loft, and a slightly newer one from the late 18th century, which stands at the opposite end of the hall. They face towards each other and, according to our knowledgeable tour guide, are sometimes played together during concerts. Just imagine the experiments I could run!
A thing that gave me pause: my first afternoon, I trekked through Josefov, the Jewish quarter. There are a couple beautiful synagogues worth visiting, as well as one of the most remarkable cemeteries you'll ever see. This tiny little yard contains the graves of over 100,000 people. The ground is so unstable that very few of the densely-packed gravestones can still stand straight up.
The Pinkasova Synagoga has an exhibit featuring some of the drawings made by children interned at Terezín, not far from Prague, during WWII. Terezín mostly acted as a relay station, temporarily holding people who would later be shipped off to extermination camps. It was the camp the Nazis used to model how benevolent they were being (supposedly) towards the 'inferior Jewish race'. Most of the inmates were relatively new arrivals and didn't look quite as emaciated as prisoners in the other camps, and conditions there weren't quite as bad as in some other places (though some 33,000 people still died, mostly of malnutrition and disease). The adult inmates were allowed to give school and art lessons to the children, which were largely designed to help them cope with the trauma they were experiencing. The drawings I saw were quite something - arresting might be the appropriate term - many of them surprisingly high in quality as well as shocking in content.
A colourful thing: the John Lennon Wall, which has been covered and recovered in layers of peace-and-love-related graffiti since the 1980s. During the communist years, the police would go every night and paint over what freedom-craving locals would put up during the day. The original portrait of John Lennon has long since disappeared, but there were a few new ones (not captured in this picture) that I could see.
A thing that reminded me of Vienna: actually, a lot of things reminded me of Vienna (apart from the horses with ears). The architecture is very similar, there are more churches than you ever knew existed in the world, and the streets do that thing where they start out facing due north and end up 400 meters later facing due south (making getting from one place to another deliberately a very challenging task).
So there you go. Eight Prague things. On Saturday I did an excursion to Kutná Hora, but what I saw there requires its own post, which I will write as soon as I recover from how cool it was. I will close with one last picture of the City of a Hundred Spires.
So there you go. Eight Prague things. On Saturday I did an excursion to Kutná Hora, but what I saw there requires its own post, which I will write as soon as I recover from how cool it was. I will close with one last picture of the City of a Hundred Spires.