Vacation in Prague, Day 3

On Tuesday the 16th we slept until nine and breakfasted on croissants and scrambled eggs, then set out to see the sights of the Jewish Quarter. This meant much less walking, as our flat was right in the middle of that part of town.

We began at the Old New Synagogue, which follows the international tradition that things with "New" in their name are often the oldest of that thing around. (Examples: Novgorod, one of the oldest cities in Russia; the Pont Neuf in Paris; and the New Forest in England, which will celebrate its thousandth anniversary in a few decades.)

The Old New Synagogue was built in 1270 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Gothic chapel, but with no crucifixes and more Jews. It does have little booths outside the main chamber with slit windows looking in, for the women of the congregation. It was nice to see that the Old New Synagogue is still an active synagogue.

The legend of the Golem of Prague mentions that the inert body of the Golem was stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue, so naturally our adventurers had to snoop around to see if there's any truth to it. The synagogue does have an attic, but it can only be reached by climbing up a series of iron rungs set into the eastern wall. The bottom fifteen or twenty feet of the rungs have been removed, so nobody can get up there without a ladder or a crane. (No mere human, anyway. A supposedly abandoned attic would make an ideal secret headquarters for a crime-fighting man of clay.)

Our second stop was the Ceremonial Hall in the middle of the old Jewish cemetery. It was the headquarters for the old Jewish burial society, and is now a museum on the history of Jewish burial societies. I found myself wondering about the influences that group might have had on later Protestant fraternal orders, which were burial societies among other functions. Weirdly, one cannot actually get into the cemetery from the Ceremonial Hall.

Next door to the Ceremonial Hall is the Klausen synagogue, which was built in 1694 and looks . . . well, almost exactly like a Baroque chapel, but with no crosses and more Jews. Evidently Prague's Jewish community were willing to follow contemporary trends in ecclesiastic architecture. Nowadays the Klausen is a museum of Jewish rituals and practices, which most of our team of adventurers were already familiar with.

Still hunting for a way into the cemetery, which was right there, we worked our way around the block to the Pinkas Synagogue, undoubtedly the saddest of Prague's remaining synagogue buildings. It was made into a Holocaust memorial in the 1950s, so the place was stripped down to the bare plaster walls, which are covered with a list of names — all the murdered Jews of Czechoslovakia.

I found the memorial doubly sad, because it means that synagogue will never host another wedding or bar mitzvah ceremony. The well-meaning artists and architects who created the memorial destroyed the synagogue as a living institution.

Already in a morbid frame of mind we finally found our way into the cemetery, which is absolutely packedwith headstones. It looks less like a cemetery and more like a storage facility for headstones. One can roughly date them by appearance — the older stones are smaller and simpler, while the later ones get big and elaborate. This cemetery is no longer used for burials, I suspect because there is literally no room left.

The exit popped us back out at the Ceremonial Hall, and from there we walked south to the Maisel Synagogue, the last one on our tour. It's a much-rebuilt building, currently in its Franz Josef era Neo-Gothic incarnation. Like too many of Prague's synagogues, the Maisel is also a museum — in this case, of the history of Jews in Bohemia and Prague in particular. It did display some works by David Gans, the Jewish scholar and mathematician who was a contemporary and occasional collaborator of Brahe and Kepler during his time in Prague.

By then it was early afternoon, the perfect time to walk another couple of blocks south to Old Town Square in time to watch the famous Astronomical Clock strike two p.m. We kept our hands on our wallets in the crowd, as it seemed like perfect conditions for a pickpocket.

With our wallets intact we walked across the square, dodging people in giant inflated bear costumes, to the wonderful Gothic church of St. Mary Before Tyn, where we saw the grave of Tycho Brahe himself. The actual grave is marked with a plain slab bearing his name in big letters, but propped above it is the old marker, with a very long and hard-to-decipher Latin epitaph, plus a bas-relief of the great Dane himself.

After that we were dog tired, so plodded back to our flat for a nap and a change of clothing before our big fancy dinner out, at a restaurant called La Veranda (which did not, in fact, have a veranda). It was actually on the same block as our own building, so getting there didn't even involve crossing a street. We all got the six-course tasting menu and shared a bottle of Czech reisling on the waiter's recommendation.

The six courses consisted of:

(1) A tiny bowl of Vichysoisse, with a good potato flavor, not too milky.

(2) Beef tartare with little dabs of truffle mayonnaise. For some reason the Czechs have adopted beef tartare as a national favorite; it was on the menu at nearly every restaurant. From which we can deduce that the meat supply chain in the Czech Republic is reliable and well-inspected.

(3) Seared foie gras. This was amazing: the exterior was crisp while the inside was like a custard. We had to get more bread for the table with this course, as none of us wanted to waste a drop of lovely liver custard.

(4) Sea Bream, served simply enough with brown butter and lemon. Yum.

(5) A little beef filet with potato puree. It was described as sirloin but looked more like hangar steak to me. Excellent either way.

(6) Seasonal berries with white chocolate gelato and currant sorbet. I accompanied this with coffee.

All in all, an excellent dinner, and we cheerfully climbed five stories back up to our flat and collapsed.

Next Time: Technology!