Vacation in Prague, Day 4

After all the activity of the first few days, we took it easy on Wednesday. Got up late and had breakfast even later, with the result that we didn't even leave the apartment until past noon.

Following a suggestion from a Prague native (see below) we crossed the river to the lovely Letna/Letenska Park on the north side of the Vltava. The park is home to the World's Biggest Metronome, a David Czerny sculpture occupying what was once the site of the World's Biggest Statue of Stalin — which, given that this is Stalin we're talking about, must have been pretty damned big. And since everything on that side of the river is a lot higher up than the other side, we wound up climbing a lot of stairs again to get to the park — only fifty meters due up instead of nearly a hundred to reach the Castle.

The park was not our destination, though. That lay on the far side: the National Technical Museum. It's a cool science-and-technology museum, with exhibits on timekeeping, chemistry, and photography. The gallery of astronomical instruments includes a giant sextant once owned by Johannes Kepler himself. There's also an extremely comprehensive and interesting exhibit about printing.

But the heart of the museum is the two-story gallery devoted to vehicles. They've got planes, trains, automobiles, bicycles, motorcyles, a balloon, and probably some pogo sticks. Among other things there's the official car of Edoard Masaryk, the first President of Czechoslovakia. Also a Spitfire of the RAF Czech Squadron (my impression is that "fighting your way back to your homeland" ties with "throwing oppressors out of windows" as the Czech national pastime). Great stuff. We prowled around for three hours.

After that it was time to rendezvous with our local contacts. Thirty-odd years ago that would have meant making a covert recognition signal, then passing documents at a dead drop. Last week it simply meant meeting the delightful young owners of Planeta9 Publishing, an up-and-coming Czech-language SF publishing house.

At their suggestion we all sat in a lovely beer garden overlooking the city, and spent a fun couple of hours talking about Prague, science fiction, aliens, crocodile reproductive systems, and the finer points of book cover design.

They finally had to leave, so we grabbed chicken "kebabs" (=gyros) at a stand in the park, then made our way back down to ground level and our flat. Other than a brief outing for more groceries, that was our day.

Awful History, Great Buildings

This seems like a good place to describe Prague. The heart of it is one of the most beautiful cities I've seen anywhere. (The suburbs look like the suburbs of just about every city in Europe I've been to.) Prague's history of foreign occupation and oppression just happened to exactly fit the worst eras of architecture.

So there are lovely Gothic structures from when Bohemia was an independent kingdom, but then the land was under foreign rule and wracked by war, so nothing important got built until the late 17th century. Once the after-effects of the Thirty Years' War finally died down there was a boom in putting up wonderful Baroque buildings (or retrofitting medieval structures with Baroque facades). That lasted until the political unrest of the French Revolution era through 1848, when the Habsburgs again cracked down on the country. So Prague missed the whole mid-19th century era of monotonous red brick.

Toward the end of the 19th century Prague became one of the industrial dynamos of the empire, so a lot of delightful Beaux-Arts buildings went up as the city expanded beyond its old walls. Independent Czechoslovakia saw some nice Art Deco construction in the 1920s, but then a decade of depression, another decade of occupation and war, followed by half a century of Communist rule meant that basically nothing got built in the center of Prague. They skipped the post-war glass box era, the moonbase buildings of the 1970s, and the "postmodern" glass boxes with doodads on top of the 1980s.

Nobody plunked an International-Style skyscraper into Old Town Square, or tried to cover the Castle with a glass pyramid. The only exception is the giant Sputnik-era television tower looming over the city on the eastern side like one of H.G. Wells's Martian fighting-machines. "Bearable" is probably the kindest way to describe it. Prague was also fortunate in that the old heart of the city didn't get wrecked by war. The Skoda works in Pizen got the lion's share of bombing raids, and the Red Army didn't have to fight its way into the city in 1945. Unlike London or Berlin, there was no need for horrible post-war "infill" construction in Prague.

I loved the buildings of old Prague. The guiding principles of local architects seem to have been: (1) More gilding! and (2) More sculptures! All the old buildings have fantastic gold detailing, or giant carved figures supporting balconies or perched atop the roofs. There's a cheerful lack of consistency, too: one can see angels and Green Men and caryatids all on the same facade.

A note to comic-book fans: Mike Mignola lied to us. His drawings of old Prague in his comics evoke a dark, creepy city, with crooked spires and blind-eyed broken angels. What he neglected to show is that those buildings are hot pink or chrome yellow, with gold mosaics like a Klimt painting over the entrance, and Tiffany glass fanlights. It's a setting for comic opera, not horror.

Next Time: How to Hide a Library!