This photo expresses my strongest recollection of Prague in 1972. Although most of the pictures to follow show a sunnier and more crowded and touristy city, I still felt a sense of gloom and dusty neglect along many of the side streets. And at night these streets, with their dim lighting, especially inside the colonnades of some buildings, reminded me of some spooky silent German Expressionist movie. Of course, the fact that only four years earlier, the Soviet Union had brutally repressed the "Prague Spring" colored my thoughts. And the contrast with newly rebuilt and prosperous (if slightly Disneyfied) Munich, my previous stop, was strong in my mind. Still, Prague, unbombed during WWII, retained its splendid architectural past, and walking around the city was an exciting experience.
As I mentioned in the previous post, Mike and I flew from Munich to Prague--we had been told that going through customs (into an "Iron Curtain" country) at the Prague airport would be a much easier process than if we were to take trains, and it wasn't very costly. We had already gotten our visas and booked a hotel (the latter, I think, chosen for us, maybe by the Czechoslovakian tourist board), and I don't remember any delay at the airport. I was struck first by the grim-looking Soviet-style apartment houses on the outskirts of the city, then by the unusual (to my eyes) smaller residences as we approached an older neighborhood, and finally by a breathtaking view of Prague Castle as our bus crossed the Vltava River:
Our hotel was a pleasant place with windows overlooking a little square. It was just a couple of blocks from the high end of Wenceslas Square (Václavské náměstí), which is really a broad avenue, though only a half mile long. Beyond the lower end are the most famous and historic parts of Prague, on both sides of the river.
Our first walk down the slope took us to to a business district (part of the "New Town" [Nové Město], dating from the late 1300s) that contained a number of interesting buildings from the turn of the 20th Century, including the 1920s Adria Palace with its odd sculpture group on an upper floor. (See here for what the building looks like today, considerably spruced up.)
Our walk was taking us into the Old Town (Staré Město) and to its center, the magnificent Old Town Square (Staroměstské náměstí). In every direction your eye is caught by buildings ranging from Gothic to Baroque. One imposing structure is the Old Town Hall (but somehow I didn't photograph its most famous feature, an astronomical clock on one side of the tower):
Here's another view of part of the square with elegant row of buildings and some young Praguers or more likely tourists from East Germany. (I noticed very few English-speaking tourists or others from Western Europe.)
Of all the buildings on the square, most striking of all was the Tyn Church, rising from behind some later structures:
Below is another photo of the Tyn Church towers (late 1400s), along with one of the baroque St Michael's Church (1730s) on another side of the square, and one of the 1915 Jan Hus Memorial, which dominates one corner of the square and has enormous political symbolism for the Czechs.
Not far from the Square was the Powder Tower, once a city gate:
As sunset fell, we followed some narrowing streets (not as shadowy to our eyes as they
appear in my photo) to the Charles Bridge, the historic structure (c.1400) connecting the Old Town to the Lesser Town (Malá Strana), with the enormous Castle complex on the hill above it. The pedestrian bridge has a number of striking religious statues along it; I took a picture of one that evening, plus several of the spires of St Vitus Cathedral, built within the Castle complex:
Other sights along the river were captivating too (though not to my Instamatic as the twilight defeated it):
The next morning we returned to the Charles Bridge and continued across it, walking uphill to the Castle for a tour of the complex. The upward walk provided panoramas of parts of the city, including of Petřín Hill with its parks and 1891 observation tower (we never got over there on this trip). The square in front of the Castle entrance had some fine c. 1900 lampposts.
The Castle gates were certainly imposing, with their brutal sculptures of giants with clubs and swords:
Among the major sights inside the gates was St Vitus, with its Gothic spires:
More modest was St George's Basilica, an ancient church with a newer baroque facade. That's Mike standing in front of it:
One curious corner of the Castle grounds, near the general exit, was the Goldsmiths' Street, its ancient shops now selling tourist items:
At various points along our stroll through the Castle complex we could see views beyond the walls and gates: of the city spread out and, closer by, a structure called Queen Anne's Summer Palace, in a park on the next hill:
After our tour of the Castle we went over to that park, where we could look back at the Castle towers and enjoy the pleasant park:
We walked down some steep streets on our way back to the Charles Bridge:
On the Bridge, in brighter daylight, I took a few more pictures of statues. Then we walked south along the streets bordering the river.
Towards evening we came upon a park alongside the river where there was music (polkas and such, I seem to recall) and dancing.
It might have been the next day that we visited Jiří Mucha--or rather, since it turned out that he was out of the country, his secretary, who showed us around his house (formerly his father's) and sold me a poster from 1930: an advertisement for an exhibition of a series of enormous paintings of scenes from Slavic history and legend. (She or Jiří mailed it to the States later in the summer.)
What I mainly remember about the secretary is that she was strikingly attractive and had Bob Dylan recordings playing in the background. The house itself was quite handsome, located in a neighborhood close to the square where we had entered the Castle; but I didn't take pictures.
The next morning we visited the Municipal Building, built 1905-11 (in the New Town near the Powder Tower), probably the most spectacular Art Nouveau building in Prague. Now fully open to the public with a theatre, cafe, and much more (as I saw in 2012), it was closed then, but a custodian let us in to look at some (dimly lit) murals that Mucha had painted on a high ceiling.
Next we visited what remains of the Jewish quarter of Prague, near the Old Town Square. First I took a picture of a plaque honoring Franz Kafka, who lived in a number of the districts around the city I've already shown. My photos of the Jewish quarter show the still-standing synagogue and part of the cemetery:
So far, everything we'd seen in Prague had been reachable by walking from our hotel. But later that day we took public transportation get to Vyšehrad, a couple of miles south from the Charles Bridge, originally a fortress on a hill, where now stands the neo-Gothic (c.1900) Basilica of St Peter and St Paul, and a cemetery with the remains of some of Bohemia's most celebrated figures, notably Dvorak, Smetana, and Mucha. In the photos below you can see a steep street taking you up to the Vyšehrad high ground; the front of the basilica; Mucha's grave; a couple of imposing statues (in a style that reminded me of the giants above the Castle gates); and three views looking across or down the Vltava from Vyšehrad.
Mike and I took one farther excursion from Central Prague: a train out to Karlstejn Castle, some 20 miles southeast of the city. (It was a little bit of a challenge buying the tickets at the station where no one spoke any English or even German at all.) Besides being an imposing structure in itself, situated on a steep hill, Karlstejn, home of various Kings of Bohemia, houses crown jewels and a number of holy relics. The walk from the train station was a beautiful one, the hills reminding me a bit of Western Pennsylvania. In the first picture below, you can see the towers of Karlstejn in the background; other shots are of the Bohemian countryside. (Sorry that the shots on this roll are a bit dim and magenta.)
There are dramatic views of the castle as you approach it:
And from the castle level we got more views of the surrounding countryside as well as of the towers and connecting structures:
The next day we boarded a bus that took us through southern Bohemia and across the border back to Western Europe--though technically a bit farther east--to Vienna, .
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