Czech Out What I Did In Prague!

Prague

Why do I like Prague so much? Well, Prague is a place of storytelling of legends, folktales, and some serious history; I love my stories.

The Astronomical Clock.
Truly one-of-a-kind.

A brief history: Prague was actually attacked and taken by the Nazi’s in 1938 (which is a year earlier than Wikipedia would tell you WW2 started). When the Nazi’s came in they were under strict orders by Hitler to not damage the city as it was his favorite. In fact, they were even under strict orders not to destroy the Jewish quarter of Prague, although for a completely different reason; Hitler intended to turn the Jewish quarter into a “museum of the extinct race.” After the war when the Nazis finally left, Prague only had a brief period before Communists took over the city until 1989. Now 22 years later, the city has formed itself into a tourist dream and one of the most popular destinations in Europe.

The interior garden of Prague Castle.

Prague has a fist-full of legends about its history. I’ll only tell a few, but I’ll recite them chronologically. The first: Before mankind existed God’s closest advisor was Lucifer. Lucifer tried to make himself a throne similar to God’s and was cast out, and so he fell from heaven to Earth. That spot where Lucifer fell is Prague, and the locals believe that because of this, Prague is the closest point to hell and heavily crowded by ghosts and demons which are often seen by locals and tourists alike. Second, the astronomical clock which is in the middle of town is one-of-a-kind. When it was built by either Master Hanus or Mikulas of Kadan (depending which local tells you the story) the town council began to fear that he would make more for other cities. To keep the astronomical clock their own and unique, they broke into his house and burned out his eyes with a hot poker. The next day, he went to the top of the clock tower and felt the gears until he found the one he was looking for, then he threw himself into the gears and his death stopped the clock for 100 years. The third is about the Old-New Church. In the Jewish Quarter lies the church where an old Jewish man named Pernath created a large rock statue, the Golem, to protect the Jewish quarter of Prague from anyone who meant it harm.

My time here has been spent travelling through the city seeing the astronomical clock, the churches (which were the design for Walt Disney’s castle), Prague Castle, and the old opera…which has another good story: When the Nazi’s took Prague, Hitler ordered a famous Jewish composer’s statue to be removed from the roof and destroyed. The soldiers who went to the top of the roof did not know what the composer looked like so they decided to destroy the statue with the biggest nose (I know…right?). Here is the twist, the statue with the biggest nose on the roof belonged to Wagner. They had knocked down a statue of a famous GERMAN composer, and even more hilarious, who was Hitler’s favorite composer. 

A statue of a man riding a suit. One
of Kafka's short stories.

When you think of the Czech people you think hard times, ghost stories, great beer, and Franz Kafka. The Kafka museum is fantastic. The nature and mood of his writing is perfectly reflected in the museum. It is almost as if you are walking through his head. Open filing cabinets, sounds of floorboards creaking, footsteps, a phone that rings but no one is there when you pick it up, long twisted staircases and dark hallways. The word “Kafkaesque” is constantly used for books and films, but I could never really understand what it meant until I visited the museum. My decision was this: Kafkaesque is a surrealistic relatable nightmare. My favorite line I saw in the museum came from one of his personal notebooks, it read: “One day, a cage went looking for a bird.”

Hmm…One day a cage went looking for a bird…