Prague: A Cutlural Guide

By Andrew Beattie

Since its foundation in the ninth century Prague has punched way above its weight to become a fulcrum of European culture. The city’s most illustrious figures in the fields of music, literature and film are well known: Mozart staged the premiere of his opera Don Giovanni here; in the early twentieth century Franz Kafka was at the forefront of the city’s intellectual life, while later writers such as Milan Kundera and film directors such as Milos Forman chronicled Prague’s fortunes under communism. Yet the city has a cultural heritage that runs far deeper than Kafka museums and Mozart-by-candlelight concerts. It encompasses the avant-garde punk group Plastic People of the Universe, the “new wave” film directors of the 1960s who made their striking movies in the city’s famed Barrandov studios, and artists such as Alfons Mucha and Frantisek Kupka whose revolutionary canvases fomented Art Nouveau and abstract art at the dawn of the twentieth century. Beyond art galleries, concert halls and cinemas the history of Prague has been one of invasion and sometimes brutal oppression. The great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck once commented that “whoever controls Prague, controls mid-Europe” and a succession of imperialist powers have taken this advice to heart, most recently Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Opposition has taken many forms, from the religious reformer Jan Hus in the fifteenth century to playwright and dissident Václav Havel, whose elevation to the Czechoslovak presidency in 1990 made him a symbol of the rebirth of democracy in Eastern Europe. In this book Andrew Beattie also reflects on the modern city, where bold new buildings such as Frank Gehry’s “Dancing House” rub shoulders with monuments from the Gothic and Baroque eras such as the Charles Bridge and St. Vitus’ Cathedral. He considers the suburbs too, home to world-renowned soccer and ice hockey teams, gleaming shopping centers and grim communist-era apartment blocks that are often home to Vietnamese, Romany and Muslim minority groups who live in a city with a growing international outlook. The Prague he reveals is an increasingly confident and diverse city of the new Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Interlink Books
• Release date: Jul 30, 2014
• ISBN: 9781623710569

Andrew Beattie

Andrew Beattie has been writing and travelling ever since he left Oxford University with a degree in Geography. He has a long-standing interest in the Alps and in 2000 he co-wrote a book on Ticino which to this day remains the only general guidebook in English published on the region. He is also the author of a cultural-historical guide to the Alps published by Signal Books. Away from the Alps, his writing has taken him to many other parts of Europe, as well as the Middle East - he has worked on books in the Rough Guides series on Switzerland, Germany and Syria, while other books for Signal include cultural-historical guides to Prague, Cairo, the River Danube and the Scottish Highlands. His website www.andrewbeattie.me.uk includes galleries of photos taken for these books and for Cicerone's Walking in Ticino. 

Book preview

In 1591 the artist Johannes Putsch created a remarkable allegorical map of Europe. It portrayed the continent as a reclining empress, with Hispania as her head, Italy, and Denmark as her arms, and Bohemia as her heart. Putsch depicted Bohemia by means of a multitude of spires that represented the city of Prague. At that time—the late sixteenth century—Prague was one of the greatest centers of Renaissance learning in Europe, thanks to the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II acting as patron to an extraordinarily diverse group of artists and scientists who flocked to his magnificent court. History was to prove Rudolf to be one of the city’s most remarkable rulers. But he was not the instigator of Prague’s greatness. By Rudolf ’s time the city had been a vital metropolis for over five centuries, flourishing on the trade that passed along the River Vltava and on the silver that was mined nearby in Kutná Hora.

Along with this greatness, however, there was a dark and mystical side to the city, of which Johannes Putsch would have been well aware. It was made apparent by the legends of the Jewish Quarter and by the alchemists whom Rudolf II attached to his court, and in ensuing centuries Prague’s dark side revealed itself to have a political dimension too, as the struggle for independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire bizarrely saw three defenestrations— the throwing of individuals out of windows—define the city’s destiny. Yet throughout centuries of turbulence Prague’s medieval and Baroque heart remained gloriously intact, undiminished by war or by the rapid suburban growth that came later on with the industrial revolution. By the turn of the twentieth century the French poet Guillaume Apollinaire, swept up by the drama of the ancient skyline, was still able to describe the city as a golden ship sailing majestically on the Vltava, while Franz Kafka, the city’s most famous literary offspring, wrote in a letter to his friend Oskar Pollack in 1902 that Prague does not let go, either of you or of me. This little mother has claws. There is nothing for it but to give in. The writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, Kafka’s contemporary, was of a similar mindset. Prague is magic, something that ties you down and holds you and always brings you back, he wrote. You can never forget it.

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The remarkable allegorical map of Europe created by Johannes Putsch in 1591, portraying the continent as a reclining empress with Bohemia as her heart

On the first floor of the City of Prague Museum, located on the outskirts of central Prague, beside the main bus station, visitors peer through glass at a vast model of the city that spreads luxuriously across a single room. The model is fashioned from cardboard and was the work of an early nineteenth-century artist named Antonín Langweil, who took over twenty years to painstakingly construct his masterpiece. Every detail is clear, from the ornate decorations on the Renaissance houses in the Old Town Square to the curving buttresses on St. Vitus’ Cathedral. What is remarkable about the model is how little in Prague has changed in the two hundred years since Langweil began work on it. The cathedral has been completed (its entire western portion dates entirely from the 1870s) and the Jewish Quarter has been remodeled, but in the model, Prague looks substantially as it does today: a Baroque city occupying a medieval ground plan, with distinctive neighborhoods and a castle overlooking it all from a spectacular eyrie above the river. No wonder that since the era of the model’s construction the city has drawn writers and tourists in their droves. Even in communist times the place was a magnet for visitors: in her 1968 book Your Guide to Czechoslovakia, Nina Nelson wrote that there was a branch of Čedok, the Czechoslovak state tourist agency, on Oxford Street in London, and that Čedok agents could sell tourists a two-week bus tour of Czechoslovakia (including flights) for just £77. That was the year, of course, when political affairs in the country made headlines all around the world, as Warsaw Pact forces intervened to crush the reform movement known as the Prague Spring. In those days tourists were relatively few in number (and most came from East Germany). But since the coming of democracy in 1990 Prague has earned a reputation for being one of the great tourist cities of the world, with tour groups clogging the major squares and thoroughfares throughout the year.

Some people lament that the place has become a giant theme park, a Disneyworld vision of olde-worlde Europe. Yet despite the crowds the city’s painful history, its literary and musical associations, its legends, and its glorious architecture still charm even the most cynical: and when that happens, as Kafka himself said, there is nothing for it but to give in, and let this extraordinary place dig its claws into you as it has so many others before.

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One of the most striking aspects of Prague that first-time visitors remark on is how green the city is. Street maps are spattered liberally with open spaces: they include parks, such as Letenské sady to the north of the city center; stretches of orchard and woodland that cover hills such as Petřín; and formal gardens often dating from the Baroque era that break up the tight knot of streets in the Lesser Quarter. In the eastern district of Vinohrady three huge cemeteries provide open spaces between the blocks of suburban tenements.

Less obvious from a map is that Prague, like Rome or Jerusalem, is built over a series of distinct hills. Viewed from the terrace of the Nebozízek restaurant near the summit of Petřín hill—probably the most relaxing drink-with-a-view that Prague can offer—the topography of the city takes the form of a choppy sea, a roll and swell of hills either side of the River Vltava, with the crests of the highest waves topped by the Gothic spires of St. Vitus’ Cathedral (in the west) and the futuristic-looking television tower (in the east). Sometimes the contours tighten to produce steep slopes, as any tourist who has struggled up through the Lesser Quarter to the castle on a hot day is all too aware. (No such trouble for those wanting to reach the Nebozízek restaurant: it is conveniently situated beside the mid-way station on Petřín’s funicular railway.) Elsewhere, in the south of the city the precipitous Botič valley is spanned by a high concrete bridge known as the Nuselský most, which carries a major highway as well as a metro line, while on the opposite bank a fast road dives through Petřín hill by means of a mile-long tunnel. A thousand years ago (and more) it was these hills that provided the earliest settlers in this part of Bohemia with a means of defense and lookout, and so led to the earliest incarnation of Prague.

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Prague Castle and St. Vitus’ Cathedral, photographed from Petřín hill

Libuše and the Legend of Prague’s Foundation

One of the best-known chroniclers of Prague’s legendary foundation, and of subsequent tales associated with the city, was the writer Alois Jirásek (1851-1930). His book Staré pověsti české, whose English title is translated variously as Legends of Old Bohemia or Old Bohemian Tales, was published in 1894 and has remained in print ever since. But Jirásek certainly was not the first author to set these tales down on paper: his work was ultimately derived from the Chronicle of the Bohemians that had flowed from the pen of Cosmas, the dean of St. Vitus’ Cathedral, between 1119 and 1125, and from subsequent works that retold the same stories, such as the fourteenth-century Dalimil Chronicle (the first written in Czech) and the 1541 Bohemian Chronicle by Václav Hájek z Libočan. According to Jirásek and the chroniclers who came before him (including Cosmas, who probably invented the stories in the first place), Bohemia was founded by a Slav chieftain named Čech, who some time in the Dark Ages had settled on a hill named Říp, situated well to the north of Prague, close to the Elbe river. (Čech also had a brother called Lech, who was the founder of Poland.) One day a chieftain named Krok (or Pace), a descendant of Čech, was advised by his pagan gods to leave Říp and travel south along the Elbe and then its tributary the Vltava to lay the foundation stone of another castle. The site that was selected was the hill now known as Vyšehrad, situated some two miles south of the modern center of Prague, overlooking the Vltava’s east bank and since the time of Alois Jirásek the site of the city’s grandest cemetery.

It is at this point that the most famous figure associated with the city’s foundation hoves into view. Libuše (named Lubossa by Cosmas) was Krok’s youngest daughter and in time became the ruler of the fortified settlement on Vyšehrad. She was a mystic and a seer, and used three enormous collapsed-together pillars of rock that still stand beneath Vyšehrad as a sundial and a means of telling her people when it would be best to harvest crops from their fields. One day Libuše was called on to settle a dispute between neighbors regarding a boundary. She made her judgment and in a rage the loser denounced Libuše. Jirásek’s account includes dialogue that he took from Hájek’s earlier chronicle: What kind of justice can we expect from a woman? the loser yelled at Libuše. Long on hair, short on brains! he went on. Where else does a woman rule over men, except here? We are the laughing stock among nations and we cannot stand for such a judge any longer! Libuše informed her detractor that she ruled with compassion, which he mistook for weakness. But she suggested that the chieftains should choose a husband for her who would rule alongside her; and she also told them where they would find such a man. A hundred and twenty paces beyond the village [of Stadice], upstream, in a narrow valley, there is a field where you will find your future duke, a ploughman, she announced to her chieftains after emerging from a visionary trance. Go, take along the clothing that is fit for a duke, give the man my message, and bring him back here to be your ruler and my husband… our descendants will rule here forever.

The men of Vyšehrad duly set off, with Libuše’s own horse guiding them. After three days they passed through Stadice and the horse led them to a man named Přemysl who was ploughing a field just beyond the village; the man worked with two oxen, one brown with a white head, the other sporting a white streak along its black and white hind legs, just as Libuše had prophesied. Her men spoke with him. Hail, man of destiny, duke given us by the Gods! they exclaimed. The whole Czech nation has chosen you for its judge, protector, and duke. Přemysl sent his oxen away (mysteriously they disappeared into a hole in the ground) and accompanied the men back to Vyšehrad to become Libuše’s husband; together he and Libuše founded Prague’s first ruling dynasty, the Přemyslids.

As yet, the hill on which Prague’s famous castle would rise was bare of settlement and still covered in forest. But one day when Libuše and her husband were walking through Vyšehrad their eyes were drawn upriver to the hill on the opposite bank. Libuše was about to have another of her visions, as Alois Jirásek recounts: her long face had taken on an intense, rapt expression, her eyes blazed, and everybody present realized that she was being inspired by the gods… she extended her arms towards the opposite shore, towards the northwest, and spoke: ‘I see before me a large city, whose glory shall reach the heavens.’ Libuše went on to tell her advisers that on the hill they would find a man building a threshold (or entrance) to his house. There you will build a castle and call it Praha, she told them. And just as people stoop when they enter a house, so will they bow to the city around my castle. It will be a noble one, respected by all the world. The man was duly found, the castle was built, and a city began to rise around it; and the city was named Praha, from the Czech word prah, meaning threshold. Later on Libuše instructed her men to head west from the castle to obtain iron ore, south for gold, east for silver, and north for lead and zinc, so creating the wealth that would allow the new city on the Hradčany hill to prosper.

Jirásek also retells two further legends surrounding Libuše. One is that she threw her son’s empty cradle into the Vltava, knowing that one day it would be used for one of Bohemia’s greatest rulers—and sure enough, centuries later it was unearthed by King John of Luxembourg who used it to cradle his son, the future Charles IV. It was Charles who endowed Prague with its university and its cathedral and its most famed architectural jewel, the Charles Bridge, so making him the greatest medieval ruler of Prague. The second legend concerns Šárka, a woman who was a close confidante of Libuše. When Libuše died, Šárka refused to submit to the rule of Přemysl and led a group of women away from Prague to establish a new and separate home for themselves near the new city. The women fought many successful campaigns against Přemysl and his warriors, but one of the warriors, Ctirad, proved particularly difficult to defeat. So Šárka was tied naked to a tree in order to lure the unfortunate warrior into a trap. Thinking she was a maiden in distress, Ctirad came over to help her, whereupon he was set upon by other women and killed. But during the encounter Šárka fell in love with Ctirad, and grief-stricken by his death she committed suicide by throwing herself off some precipitous limestone cliffs. Those cliffs now mark the entrance to the Šárka valley, a popular place for picnics and walks on the western edge of Prague that is described more fully in Chapter Seven.

What Really Happened: The History of Prague to 1000 AD

The story of Libuše and the early foundation of Prague is full of motifs that also appear in other European sagas. The ploughman-as-ruler is a stock figure in Central European legends and Libuše’s vision of a city that shall touch the stars has its antecedents in the Aeneid. Some historians have identified the legendary Libuše with the real-life Matilda of Toscana (1046-1115), a powerful ruler who also appears in the work of Cosmas. The origins of the name Praha are also open to debate: it might be derived from the Czech pražiti, which means cleansing the forest by fire, or prahy, which are eddies in a river, or a phrase meaning a barren place burned by the sun, na prazě. Nonetheless the story of Libuše’s founding of Prague has seeped into Czech popular culture, being told and retold in various forms such as the play The Founding of Prague (1815) by the great German romantic poet Clemens Brentano, and by the composer Bedřich Smetana in his 1872 opera Libuše. By then the myth had been thoroughly subverted into national tradition.

The truth of Prague’s foundation is rather more prosaic and sees the first settlement being established on the Hradčany hill (the castle hill) rather than on Vyšehrad, as legend would prefer it. Archaeological evidence points to central Bohemia being settled since at least the Stone Age, and by 4000 BC trade routes crossed the Vltava where the Charles Bridge does today, linking long-established farming communities. In around 500 BC the area became home to a Celtic tribe known as the Boii, after whom Bohemia is named, and in around 9 AD the Boii were ousted by the Germanic Marcomanni tribe under their leader King Maroboduus. Neither people was ever conquered by the Romans, who hunkered down south of the natural defensive line of the River Danube, under constant threat of attack from their unruly neighbors to the north of the river. When the Roman Empire disintegrated, Slavic tribes, who originated in western Russia, began to move into Central Europe from the northeast (and are mentioned as being in Bohemia for the first time in 512 AD by the Byzantine historian Procopius).

In the seventh century these Slavic tribes were briefly subjugated by the Avars, who came here from east of the Carpathians; but the Avars were eventually sent back east by Charlemagne, and Bohemia was subsumed into the Great Moravian Empire, which incorporated what is now the Czech and Slovak Republics as well as parts of Hungary and Poland. Ratislav, the son of the first Great Moravian Emperor Mojmír, invited the Byzantine missionaries Cyril and Methodius to introduce Christianity into the region. They baptized Bořivoj, Bohemia’s ruler from around 852, and the founder of the Přemyslid dynasty of dukes and kings. The sacred glow of Christianity came to replace the secret shadows of paganism over the whole land, wrote Alois Jirásek in Old Bohemian Tales. The idol Perun [the pagan god worshipped by Libuše] on Vyšehrad was destroyed… other idols, dedicated to the gods of trees, waters and darkness, all disappeared. By this time the Slavs had established an important military stronghold on the Hradčany hill, and indeed had buried one of their warriors with his sword in an ornate grave that was uncovered centuries later in what is now the castle’s third courtyard.

In 896 the Great Moravian Empire was conquered by the Magyars (Hungarians) and split in two. The Slavs to the west of the Morava river—the Czechs—swore allegiance to Arnulf, the Frankish emperor, while those to the east (Slovaks) threw in their lot with the Magyars. It was to be another thousand years before Czechs and Slovaks were brought together again as one political entity (when Czechoslovakia was created, in 1918). Over the course of the tenth century the Přemyslids gradually consolidated their power in central Bohemia, establishing a military base on Vyšehrad in around 930 (to protect the Vltava’s east bank) and defeating the last of their enemies, the Slavníkovci tribe, in 995 at Libice. By then the city of Prague was well established: thirty years before the battle at Libice an Arab-Jewish merchant from Tortosa in Spain named Ibrahim Ibn Ya’qub had written that Prague is built from stone and lime, and it has the biggest trade center. Slavs are on the whole courageous and brave… they occupy the lands which are the most fertile and abundant with a good food supply. The Prague that Ibn Ya’qub saw in 965 consisted of a prosperous mercantile community that had established itself on the ledge of land between the Hradčany hill and the river—the district that was to become known as the Lesser Quarter. Within a few decades the city was set to spill over to the river’s east bank, where the Old Town and New Town would eventually be founded.

The Capital of the Czech Republic

Modern Prague has a population of 1.3 million, making it around the same size as Dallas or San Diego, or the English cities of Birmingham and Coventry combined. Growth has not been constant. In the year 1200 the city’s population was 3,500, similar to that of contemporary Nuremberg or Bruges, but expansion during the rule of Charles IV in the fourteenth century was followed by a halving of the population during the bloody course of the Thirty Years War. By 1784, when the four original settlements on either side of the Vltava were officially united to form Prague, the population had risen to 80,000. Most inhabitants at that time spoke German—in fact the Emperor Ferdinand III once remarked that a Czech on the Charles Bridge was as rare as a stag with golden antlers. In the nineteenth century the industrial revolution led to a huge influx of people who came to live in the burgeoning suburbs that wrapped themselves around new factories such as Smíchov, to the south of the Lesser Quarter, which grew up around the huge Staropramen brewery. The newcomers were Czech speakers, at last eroding the predominance of German.

In 1861 Czech became the majority language on the Town Council and by 1900 German speakers formed only eight percent of the Prague population, although the curious linguistic geography of the city at the time meant that the city comprised a German-speaking center surrounded by Czech-speaking suburbs. At the birth of Czechoslovakia in 1918 the population of Prague was 700,000, making the city the sixth largest in Europe. Poverty was endemic, however: four-fifths of dwellings lacked a bath and a quarter of apartments had only one room. It was the poverty of cities such as Prague, as well as the difficulty of making a living in the countryside, that saw many Czechs emigrate to the United States in the nineteenth century; the composer Antonín Dvořák traveled among these communities when he composed his symphony From the New World and their heritage lives on in communities named Prague in Texas, Oklahoma, and Nebraska, and New Prague in Minnesota.

In 1938, on the eve of the Nazi invasion, the population of Prague reached one million for the first time. The removal of tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust and the expulsion of the city’s ethnic Germans at the end of the Second World War led to a period of severe decline, which was exacerbated by the flight abroad of many middle-class Czechs when the communists came to power in 1948. But from the 1950s onwards the city expanded, largely because of the communist regime’s deliberate policy of developing urban-based heavy industry that attracted migrants from the countryside. (Those migrants already faced reduced prospects of working on farms as agriculture was steadily collectivized.) The herding of people into apartment blocks on large estates also made it easier to police and supervise them, and the regime hoped it would encourage the creation of a classless society.

The relentless growth abated somewhat during the relaxation of travel restrictions that came with liberalizing movement known as the Prague Spring, when around 150,000 Czechs emigrated, many of them from Prague. But the influx of migrant workers from Vietnam and the forced resettlement in the city of Roma communities ensured that the trajectory remained broadly upwards during the 1970s and 1980s. Since 1990, with Prague forming the heart of the Czech business and tourist economy, population expansion has continued apace.

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The Charles Bridge, an iconic landmark of Prague, photographed from the Old Town Bridge Tower; in the distance can be seen the spires of the Lesser Quarter with the Castle rising on the Hradčany hill beyond

Most visitors to Prague find that orientation in the city is very straightforward. This is because Prague is divided into distinct districts, each with its own hub, its own history, and its own character. The distinctiveness of each district is a result of the four original towns of Prague, developing independently and only merging into a single political and economic entity in 1784. Those four towns were the Old Town, the New Town, the Lesser Quarter, and the Castle District on Hradčany hill; in 1850 Josefov, the Jewish Quarter, was added, and in 1883 Vyšehrad, the site of Prague’s legendary (though not actual) foundation, became part of the city. Each district continues to exert its own sense of individuality to this day, which is why just a few days spent in Prague uncovers such a variety and richness of urban experience.

The View from Charles Bridge

The Charles Bridge—perhaps the single most distinctive architectural monument in Prague, and according to the writer Ivan Klíma the material and spiritual center of the city—has linked the Vltava’s west and east banks since 1357. It has been a draw for visitors for almost as long. In his 1897 travel book Pictures from Bohemia, James Baker remarked that all life in Prague centers round the Carls [sic] bridge… in Prague the bridge draws all visitors to its statued arches, there to look around at the city, with its towers, and pinnacles, and clustered buildings, stretching away on either side of the swiftrushing Moldau [Vltava]. Baker was right: the bridge is unquestionably one of the best places where newcomers to Prague can begin to gain an understanding of the city’s layout, and from its parapets the view of towers and pinnacles and clustered buildings brings the proverbial cliché of fairytale Prague most palpably to life.

Before the construction of the bridge—going back thousands of years—trade routes crossed the