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In the shadow of Prague
Somewhere it was written:
"Prague is the most beautiful city in Europe. The
history of Europe cannot be conceived without
Prague...". It may have been on a list of
cities one arrives at and leaves behind, or in the
words of a Czech receptionist who spoke Spanish and
Mexican football the way he spoke of the economics
degree he was studying in Germany, or of the team with
which he trained on weekends at a primary school in
Austria, because working reception was a summer job, a
favour to a friend, and a wage in the meantime, all
while helping guests in German, Swedish, or English
and saying, to quote him, "The language is
beautiful...". Prague is reached by the highway
that comes from Berlin, three hundred kilometres to the
north; to the south lie Vienna, Budapest, and
Bratislava, yet in Hungary and in the Czech and Slovak
republics there are no overland routes like those of
Western Europe, only rural roads between villages and
sawmills, the culture of wood, of days passed from
shadow to shadow or beneath shelter from the rain,
among forests where the sun does not pierce the
thickness of history in the treetops, and where, they
say, something older than men still listens to every
engine that passes.
The Czech Republic and its capital could be summed up
in a sentence that might just as easily have appeared
beneath a black-and-white photograph in some book on
some shelf, or on the wall of a back room in a
basement on the outskirts of Madrid: country and city
colliding, opposing one another. A rural life utterly
different from that of the metropolis, damp air among
forests that from time to time open to make room for a
village, almost forced into place, almost set there by
error or necessity, and people who, nevertheless, live
from nature without quite wounding it, in cycles of
sowing and harvest that are just as vital to
woodcutters. On the other side rises the city of still
silhouettes, lifting itself magnificently among towers
and carmine roofs, above the horizon with dawn and
dusk at its back, above that universe of forms,
styles, and beauty which has long been reflected in
every corner, in alleys and squares, in that body of
streets that encloses the silence of the past within
its veins. Where mortals see history, others see claw
marks half erased by the centuries.
As a point of departure, in terms of elevation, the
River Vltava runs through the city from south to north
in the shape of a question mark, and like almost any
European city built on the banks of ancient channels,
it joins its two shores with bridges that are
synonymous with Art: a way of enclosing functionality
within beauty, of juxtaposing their qualities for the
delight of a present-that-is-past, a present-today, or
a present-yet-to-come. A Kafkaesque river metaphor of
reflections on water, of passageways stretched over
the current, guarded by two ghostly towers that serve
as beginning and end, entrance and exit, along the
five hundred metres of Karluv most, Charles Bridge,
lined with thirty-three baroque statues: some of
bishops, others of heroes, pieties, and holy images
with cold gazes and muted colours, watchers of the
passing of time. It has stood for many years since
1407, when under the reign of Charles IV, and
replacing an earlier bridge destroyed by a mudslide,
it was raised and became Prague's undisputed symbol.
It is a place for sepia postcards, for musicians of
every kind, guitarists playing English rock or jazz
quintets; for easels with painters before canvases
that slowly fill with the image of a city, a river, or
some near or distant building made worthy of portrait;
for catching in a single instant a violet sunset, a
noon blue filtered through parted clouds after a rainy
morning. By day, a perfect painting. By night, the
same bridge the Kindred call the Bridge of Ashes,
when the statues seem to recount, but only to those
who listen, how much blood has fallen into the water
since it was raised.
To the west of the river, visible from almost any
point, stands Prazsky hrad, Prague Castle, whose
construction began in the seventh century, which was
later burned in 1541 and completed in the eighteenth
century by the Italian architect Nicolo Pacassi, and
which is now the seat of government of the former
Czechoslovakia. A wall surrounds the complex, and two
stairways lead into it from the east and south, an
area also filled with postcards and vendors selling
every sort of trinket: spring mobiles, lithographs,
coloured watercolours, landscapes, even miniature
cities, "Build Your Own Prague," grey and white
buildings, and reproductions of street-name plaques:
Karlova, Nerudova, from which the poet Neftali Reyes
took his pseudonym. Climbing from the eastern
entrance, after passing through the castle walls, one
reaches the Royal Palace, former residence of the
Czech monarchy, gateway to the square where Saint
Vitus Cathedral rises, its hundred-metre tower where
the ends of the cross converge, begun in 1344 by
Matthias of Arras and Petr Parler, also the architect
of Charles Bridge, and the Chapel of Saint Wenceslas,
raised in 1360 above the saint's tomb inside the
cathedral. Around it stand the Basilica of Saint
George, the best-preserved Romanesque building in the
city, Dalibor Tower, and the Belvedere Summer Palace,
considered the finest Renaissance monument outside
Italy. All of it is contained within Hadrëany
namesti, the Castle district, atop a hill north of a
city that by night lights every bridge and throws
vertical shadows across its walls, in an atmosphere of
silence, mystery, and silhouettes that break the
dimness of a city that sleeps, or believes it sleeps,
while others divide its domains beneath those very
lights.
On the eastern side, across the bridge and to the
north, lie the Jewish Quarter, the oldest synagogue
in Europe (1270), and the cemetery, with Hebrew
tombstones from another age. The Jewish Quarter and
its disorderly web of streets, doors, and windows; of
aged steps reflecting a telephone wire and a doorway
on Maiselova Street; the emptiness of a Saturday
afternoon after a Friday of unbroken rain; pools and
reflections between cobblestones that form the path of
one people, of a thousand peoples. Karlova Street
opens onto the Old Town Square, an open esplanade
where opera advertisements, recitals, performances,
concerts, and even a bar specialising in Mexican, or
Czech, beer at a low price and dubious quality.
The Church of Our Lady before Tyn, with its Gothic
towers lifting the self toward the sky; Saint
Nicholas, the Evangelist, in Baroque style, perhaps
the most beautiful church in this part of the city;
the Astronomical Clock on the Town Hall tower, one of
zodiac symbols, the other of walls and windows built
in diverse styles, Gothic and Romanesque, medieval,
shaped by the clockmaker Nicolas Kadan and the
craftsman Jan Hanus in the sixteenth century, or by
the Gothic house that first stood there in 1338. Near
the square is the house where Franz Kafka lived and,
far away, on the other side of the river and far to
the south, the Carolinum (1348), the oldest
university in Central Europe, likewise founded under
Charles IV. Beneath all of it, they say, run tunnels
and chambers where Prague's vampire war wrote
chapters you will never see in tourist guides.
Today Prague is the most important city in the Czech
Republic and, as travel slogans insist, perhaps in
Europe as well. That may be true as long as no
comparisons are made. Prague gathers, one by one, the
arts that have flourished most strongly elsewhere in
the Old Continent; within its streets, squares, and
bridges it keeps fragments of world history, Western
aesthetics, and the music and thought of humankind.
Likewise, in this country now recovered from a war
that followed more than thirty years of dictatorship,
people smile, ride the tram through the streets, and
speak loudly. They talk about the possibility that
Prague truly is the most beautiful city and set
themselves apart, for example, from Hungarian,
German, or Polish societies:
"They are sad, bitter-faced. We lived through the
same, and it cost us dearly, but we smile, and we
will go on smiling."
And while they smile, beneath the surface they still
count, under the ash of the Nights of White Ash, the
bodies the river carried away and the shadows that
still contest every district.
In the light of day, Prague belongs to the living. In shadow,
it remains a battlefield.
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