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Sleepless in Prague
A reflective, intimate portrait of a city...
Before visiting Prague I read about its history and art and architecture, and I imagined the city in its rickety medieval cloak, its dead-end alleys, its beer-halls and dingy back-street bars where red-faced and wild-haired men, stout as barrels, gulped beer and bellowed.
Now standing in the Old Town Square I sniffed and squinted. And I detected a whiff of Prague's medieval aura in the sulking facades and in the smell of tar the cobbled stones emitted. These were inklings, a promise even, that at the right place and time I would experience Prague reeking with its medieval atmosphere.
On my first stop I waited for the Astronomical Clock's toll on the hour. Chiming every hour since 1410, the clock is a mechanical marvel and a puppet show. After its melodious chime two small windows open and statuettes of the Apostles bow and parade past the windows. Another 4 figurines represent 15th-Century Prague's shadows - Vanity, Greed, Death, Pagan Invasion - while opposing figurines symbolize enlightenment - Chronicler, Angel, Astronomer, Philosopher. Watching the clock should be a reflective moment hushed with the burden of human history, its delusions and conflicts, but my moment was ruined by a hundred cameras clicking, their flashes like strobes, people crowing in childish awe, and a woman standing under the clock holding up a poster advertising "Prague Walks."
I visited in the low season, November, but still tourists clogged the streets of central Prague, dawdling and gawking. In this city crowded by millions of visitors annually everything is put up for the tourists: the horse-drawn cabbies with their clinking bells, the touts in coloured Joker hats, the clangs of the blacksmiths hammering old bronze coins, the touts pulling the strings of their carton cocks to produce rattles of cackling, the hawkers posing as street artists, a thousand jewelry and ceramic shops.
And so I stalked medieval Prague as if stalking mirages. For refuge against Prague's Disneyland atmosphere I retreated in cafes to read Franz Kafka, Prague's literary son.
On my second night, after dinner, I went to a bar behind the Old Town Square and sat sipping pints of Budvar and Pilsen and reading Kafka. Several pints and short stories later Kafka's melancholy made me restless and alive with reckless hedonism. I asked a Czech where I could find a club.
A bit tipsy, I tottered into the night accompanied by my trekking boots ringing through the hollow cobble-stoned alleys. Ten minutes later I was lost in the Old Town's maze of alleys; central Prague is compact, I reasoned, and soon I would stumble into a landmark I would recognize. A while later a prickle crawled up my spine and I glanced over my shoulders. Kafka's shadow dawdled around the corner, breathing in gasps, his eyes burning with passionate observation. Haunting me. I gazed at the baroque facades: like reflective witnesses, their latticed wooden windows weary, they sighed under layers of history.
Now I glimpsed medieval Prague, so I ambled on, through arcades, through tunnels of scaffolding, down dark alleys. The buildings smelled of damp smoke. The streetlights glimmered on the cobblestones like twinkles on a lover's dark eyes. The sky was a smoky grey. I felt, like a furtive witness, self-conscious to disturb the stony silence. That night I bumped into comical drunks croaking in their throaty voices, and prostitutes loitering in corners, stepping into the lamplight to advertise their availability as I walked past. These characters too, I thought, populated the nights of Prague in its bygone days, when it lived in cloistered bliss.
The next night, after a couple of pints in a cellar bar in the back streets of Josefov, the former Jewish ghetto, I explored Prague again. The facades of buildings and churches lit by the glare of flashlights looked like carton cutouts propped on stage for a play, painted in pastel colours and designs. I ducked into passageways underneath the houses and wandered into courtyards. Christian shrines and statues gazed down at me. Then I followed the Royal Way - the way the monarchs paraded in armour - from the Old Town Square to Charles Bridge.
Shrouded in a flavour of decaying plants, the Vlatva River flowed with a gurgle. The 30 blackened statues of Christian saints lining Charles Bridge, their heads splotched with gulls' feces, were stooped in silhouette like sentries protecting this 400-year-old bridge. Gangs of young people wavered home, laughing into the night.
On one side of the river I could see Mala Strana, a residential district of baroque architecture, flanked by Petrin Hill known as "the lovers' park." Prague Castle squatted on the crest of a hill, the largest fortified ancient castle in the world. Originally built by Prince Borivoj as a fortified settlement in the 9th Century, successive rulers added more layers. Each era is evident in the different architectural styles of its buildings, monasteries and churches. Like a thistle flower head with 3 thorns, the three Gothic spires of St Vitrus Cathedral pierce the skyline. On the other side of the river church spires, towers and domes also spike the cityscape.
Prague is a celebration of arts and architecture, an era dating back to the 13th Century when Charles IV, a writer who studied in Paris and traveled widely, tried to recreate all the architectural style he had admired during his travels. He wanted to make Prague the cultural heart of Europe. His tradition lives on: guidebooks label Prague as `the City of Music' and theatre buffs train their sights on Prague all year round. The scaffolding around buildings undergoing restoration is plastered with posters advertising concerts, raves, and plays.
Prague is a window on all the architectural styles of Europe: baroque, gothic, Romanesque, renaissance, rococo, neoclassical, art nouveau, and cubist, a style unique to the former Czechoslovakia. From Charles Bridge I had a vista of all these architectural styles standing shoulder to shoulder. History has brought them together. And they blend well because, like geological layers, they reflect the eras Prague went through. The city's architectural face echoes the cycles of ups and downs throughout the ages; now, after 40 years of Communism, Prague is blossoming again, economically and culturally.
Kafka was with me again that night. He was a paranoid insomniac, his claustrophobic prose splashed with a gothic blackness, with dark humour. His romances ended in tragedy, scalding his heart. He found solace in writing, though he became an acclaimed author after his death when his friend Max Brod published his manuscripts. Tuberculosis killed him at the age of 41. Prague haunted Kafka. And Kafka haunted Prague.
I felt hungry after my midnight stroll and in Wenceslas Square I bought a sausage in a bun from a kiosk. Czechs love these sausages, perhaps because they are a cheap and stand-up way of filling up. When I bit into the sausage fat spluttered over my mouth and I leaned forward so it wouldn't stain my clothes. The fat, slurping in my mouth, made me queasy. I chucked half of the sausage in a bin. The blond woman in the kiosk watched me with an amusing smile, and I tried to chat her but she didn't speak English.
Prague felt intimate, and every night, after a couple of pints in the bars with their air of cigarette smoke and freshly brewed beer, I took detours through the Old Town on my way home. Accompanied by Kafka and the beer coursing through my veins, every night I felt I was seeing Prague anew.
© Victor Paul Borg
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