So with a week left to go, I figure I’d get in some last minute touristing opportunities (and actually remember to bring a camera along this time…). Earlier this week I mapped out several good touring spots to hit this weekend, and with the camera fully charged up I set out to wander seemingly endlessly across the city (not to mention getting some good walking exercise for the Biggest Loser competition…oh yeah, I’m still in the running for that too…).
Also, I’d like to say thanks to the Frommer’s Guidebook people for having very helpful sections in the Prague book about this…it was quite the time-saver.
Today I set out searching for the monuments left over from the communist era in Prague; the sad thing was a lot of them were easy to find simply because they were so damned ugly (honestly, the architecture is named “brutalist” for a reason, it’s extremely painful to look at).
First on the list was the Tesco building that’s barely two blocks from my apartment. It was built in the mid-1970s and it pretty much epitomized the “Brutalist” style of architecture (namely, having all the ducts, pipes, and other inner parts of the building on the outside), and it’s gotten a LOT of flak from people over the decades for its rather hideous design (perhaps most famously by Prince Charles of Britain). However, since there are so few Communist-era buildings remaining in central Prague, a number of architectural enthusiasts had it registered as a nationally-protected cultural landmark after Tesco announced plans to knock it down and build something better-looking.
See, even the weather wanted to show how horrific this building is...
Next I walked east towards perhaps the most famous Czech landmark during the 1989 Velvet Revolution (the peaceful overthrow of the Communist regime), Wenceslas Square. On a normal day you might see several thousand people walking along the square for any and all manner of reasons, but during the fall of 1989 there were over HALF A MILLION people crammed into that relatively small space, and that’s in a city of maybe 1.2 million people at the time! So yeah…this was the event to be at during that time. A lot has changed since then, no doubt about it; most of the square has fallen prey to capitalism (the balcony where then-dissident and future president Vaclav Havel addressed the protesters is now part of a British clothing store chain), but the sense of scale there is still bewildering. Standing at the top of the square, it’s hard to believe that over half of the city crowded into there…
...that's one big square...but still, mind-boggling how to fit over 500,000 in there...
Over to the side of the square, though, is another monument to “brutalist” architecture. The former parliament building sits right next to the museum at the top of the square, and like the Tesco building before it, it’s design is rather hideous to the extreme. If the architects were planning function without any beauty, they succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.
Definitely not the prettiest building in the world...
Of course, by this time I was starting to get hungry, so I headed over to a bagel place in Old Town that served food American style (and with free refills too, who can argue with that?). On the way there I passed yet another communist era landmark, though it was at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wenceslas Square. In the same building that served as Franz Kafka’s grammar school, close to the spot where the Thirty Years War began, and near an apartment once where Einstein once lived, there is the Kinsky Palace where, in 1948, the leader of the Czech Communist Party announced what was essentially a coup d’etat, greeted with cheers by the population below (who naively believed that, after World War II, the Communists would bring the peace and prosperity they promised). It’s quite eerie, honestly; seeing Old Town Square crowded on a Saturday, it’s not hard to see what it would have been like on that day…scary stuff.
Seriously, the place looks too cheerful to be the scene of a coup d'etat...
Speaking of scary, the next sight on my list of places to see is the site that once held the world’s largest statue of Iosef Dzhugashvili (better known as Stalin, literally meaning “Man of Steel”). Built during the height of his cult of personality, when it was finished in 1955 (two years after the man himself had died), said personality cult was already starting to die off, so the opening ceremony was probably more than a little awkward…
After several years of wondering what the heck to do with this rather lavish statue of a man that was now officially reviled as a monster, in 1962 the state authorities finally decided to dynamite the thing and get rid of it (unfortunately for the city residents, though, they had to use enough dynamite to blow out most of the windows in Prague to demolish the statue). For almost the next three decades the site remained empty and something of an eyesore for the city, so in 1991 the government allowed a certain artist to recycle the site with a new structure, but since the artist was David Cerny (the prankster artist of Prague, if you recall), what they got was a giant metronome that is supposedly “counting the time since the Velvet Revolution.” It’s quite surreal being up there, watching the metronome sway quitely back and forth while the rest of the city goes about their lives down below, watching over everything and just keeping time…
That thing is HUGE!
I was surprised by the kind of view this site had over the rest of Prague.
Yes Prague still stinks communism, you can feel it in the architecture but also in the behavior of Czech people