We really weren’t putting too much thought into Prague until we heard there was a twenty Euro FlexBus running from Dresden to the Czech capital. So why not go? We had been working on our garden in Goerlitz throughout the fall, and now that the weather had turned chill it seemed like a weekend in Prague was probably better than a weekend anywhere else in Northern Europe. And in the end it turned out that it was, I guess.
It was an hour walk from the FlexBus terminal at the Bahnhof to our room on the road up to the castle hill. Unfortunately, dragging our rolling luggage across the uneven cobblestone streets proved to be extremely vexing. At the Altstadt we stopped to rest and observe the milling tourists waiting for the tolling of the hour on the Rathaus tower. Amazingly, the bell chain is still being pulled by a smug, nonchalant 15th century skeleton!
Yasha pointed out the scenes painted on the lower section of the Astronomical Clock. Scenes of everyday peasant life are surrounded by figures from the Zodiac. “As above, so below, as within, so without, as the universe, so the soul,” quoted Yasha. “Yes, I know. You’ve told me that before,” I replied drily. Yasha just loves talking about Alchemy. The tourists applauded as doors opened above the Astronomical Clock and the Twelve Apostles looked down, one by one, on the crowd below.
We dropped off our bags at the splendid little guest house Residence Thunovska 19 and then ascended through the gathering gloom to the castle on top of the hill. When I had visited Prague some twenty years before it had been a more casual affair. Yasha, my mother and I had walked through St. Veit’s Cathedral and the Castle at a rapid pace, not even paying. At that time it was simply a magnificent cathedral, not an object of mass tourist consumption. Nowadays a ticket is required and it’s even suggested you buy it a day before-hand. And it’s good we did. The Archbishop of Prague, Dominik Duka, had died several days before; although St. Veit’s Cathedral would be open the next day it would be closed the remainder of the week for the high funeral of the cardinal. We bought our tickets for the next day and stumbled back down the hill. Bemoaning our fate, we drank Pilsner Urquell and ate roasted pig’s knuckles in a smoky hole-in-the wall bar across from our guest house. I guess it doesn’t get more Czech than that!
The following morning we sat in a pew of St Veit’s Cathedral, the tide of tourists swirling around us. “This place makes me hear Angele Dubeau playing On the Nature of Daylight.” I said. “Yeah, I guess,” Yasha said, “A little bit.” She swiveled her head around to look behind us. “What’s that noise?” Workmen were carrying in the added chairs for the funeral service planned for the next day. We would have to move…
We shuffled along with the throng of people around the circumference of the cathedral. “According to this,” Yasha gestured to the brochure in her hand, “this hill, Hradcany Hill, had been a meeting place for both Pagans and Christians until St. Wenzel built a Romanesque rotunda here in 930 CE. That Romanesque rotunda today lies beneath both the Western Tower and the St. Wenzel Chapel of St. Veit’s.” “Ok”, I said, “But what’s that thing over there?”
We stood in silence, studying a massive silver tomb. Yasha pointed with her brochure. “It says here that this is the tomb of St. John of Nepomuk. His crime was that he refused to disclose the Queen’s confessional to her political opponents. Consequently he was tortured and thrown off the Charles Bridge.” “I think I remember him,” I said, “He’s a popular saint in Bohemian Catholicism. And that sure is a lot of silver!” We were slowly being pushed away from the St. John of Nepomuk tomb by the shuffling crowd. So I took Yasha’s hand and we walked around the corner to the St. Wenzel tomb.
Also called the St. Wenceslas Chapel, St. Wenzel’s tomb is a high gothic masterpiece and the beating heart of Czech spirituality. Thousands of gems encrust the walls while a spiderweb of gold leaf stitches together the various frescos on the lower walls. Frescos depicting scenes from the life of St Wenceslas, Jesus, and the Old Testament stand on either side of a statue dedicated to the creator of the Wenzel Chapel, King Charles IV. All the kings of old Bohemia were coronated in this room, and to increase the spiritual potency of the coronation the ruins of Wenceslas’s original Romanesque rotunda, along with the Crown Jewels, are hidden below the floor. Obscured by the actual tomb St Wenceslas (in the right had corner of the photo) is the gorgeous golden pastophorium of St. Wensel.
Exhausted by the beauty, we walked outside to clear our heads in the cold November air.
The construction of St Veit’s originally began in 1344 and continued throughout six hundred years of construction, wars, fire and remodeling. The Golden Portal with its mosaic of the Last Judgement was originally constructed by King Charles IV’s architect, Peter Parler. But the Hussite Wars and the Great Fire of 1541 caused a construction pause that lasted hundreds of years. Renaissance and Baroque ornamentation fashions rose and fell, with much of the Baroque excesses stripped out of the Cathedral in the 1860’s. Today you can see beautiful Art Nouveau stained glass windows, Modernist Madonnas and the Expressionistic wrought iron gate work outside the Golden Portal.
And then of course there’s the massive, buttressed Southern Facade,
Our ticket to St. Veit’s Cathedral came along with a ticket to the old Imperial Palace and to something called “The Golden Lane.” Since we were immediately opposite the Imperial Palace we strolled over, presented out ticket and went in. Unfortunately it was a crashing disappointment. The immense building was totally empty, and I suppose it’s been empty since the kings were done away with and Czechoslovakia became a republic in the early 20th century. We walked to a corner room, the site of the famed Defenestration of 1618. The ejection of the Catholic Regents out the window into a giant pile of shit below (which evidently saved their lives) sadly precipitated the 30 Years War. Dreamily we passed into the giant banqueting hall – as large as a football pitch – where drunken revelers had laughed, screamed and cursed while King Rudolph II silently sat on his throne, soundlessly engaged in alchemical speculation. Only the ghosts remain today.
We continued on to the Golden Lane. As we pushed through the crowd Yasha exclaimed, “I know this place! I’ve read about it!” She pointed to a small tower rising above the walls of the lane. “That’s the Powder Tower, where they conducted alchemical investigations, and through a trapdoor in the cellar is the dungeon where John Dee’s familiar, Edward Kelly, was thrown down and tortured while he was in Prague!” Who’s John Dee, and who’s Edward Kelly?” I stupidly asked. “John Dee was Queen Elizabeth’s court alchemist; everyone knows about him! Oh never mind! Let’s go inside!”
Like much of Prague, the Golden Lane has been loved a little too much. Built inside the castle fortification walls during the 15th century, the lower floors were one room hovels while the upper floor was one continuous gun room with narrow slits for wind-up crossbows and firearms. By chance I had recently read Benjamin Blacks’s Prague Nights, a historical mystery revolving around alchemy and sleaze in the Golden Lane. Somehow, I thought it was still going to be like that. Instead we were greeted by a surging crowd, the obligatory Starbucks clutched in one hand. I was instantly turned off. “You go on”, I said to Yasha, “I’ll wait for you here.” “No, No!” she exclaimed, “come and look at this stuff!” She dragged me over to the first of the gayly painted hovels. You couldn’t really walk inside; each of the tiny houses was sealed behind a glass door, with a representative interior from the 15th century. There was a shoe maker shop, a tiny room for one of the castle’s marksmen (with a bed so short who knows who could even sleep in it), a tavern with room for only a few inebriates, and of course, Franz Kafka’s house. The tiny hovels had been occupied until the 1950’s with a trough down the middle of the street for sewage. From our standpoint Renaissance hygiene was bleak and unimaginable. Amidst it all, the Powder Tower had been converted into a shop selling tacky nicknacks. Yet there was obviously alchemy present here, perhaps the highest sort, for a mediocre tourist experience had being converted into gold (or Euros)! “I think it’s time to leave”, I said.
The following morning we rose early to explore Charles Bridge at daybreak.
This iconic stone bridge, designed by Charles IV’s architect Peter Parler in 1342 was until the 19th Century the only stone bridge crossing the Vitava River in Prague. Thirty monumental Baroque statues and statuettes form a continuous alley from the Mala Strana Bridge Tower all the way to the Old Town.
Naturally the Charles Bridge makes an excellent vantage point for watching boats and fishermen traveling below. But as the day wore on gathering throngs of tourists flocked to the bridge. It’s like this every day, winter or summer. Some were touching statutes, stroking them to bring good luck. Not to be outdone, we stroked them also, wishing for long life and happiness for all beings. Unfortunately there was one being we couldn’t help. That was St John of Nepomuk; his desecrated and dismembered body had been thrown from the Charles Bridge. We paused next to a statue with John of Nepomuk’s characteristic halo of stars, and beside that, a memorial at the spot where his body had began it’s long and slow journey to the sea.
At the far side of the Charles Bridge, the Old Town side, rises the magnificent Old Town Bridge Tower.
The Old Town Bridge Tower is another one of Peter Parler’s creations. The entire Renaissance world walked beneath the tower, from tradesmen with ox carts to the royal coronation procession.
The Old Town Bridge Tower leads directly into the fantastic jumble of the Old Town, where the high learning of the Jesuit Klementinum existed side by side with the Golem, the apocryphal monster protecting the Jewish faith. This wasn’t a battle between reason and faith, it was obviously much, much more.
So we took a tour of the Klementinum, the largest building in Prague outside of the Prague Castle. It’s not difficult to imagine how Alchemy, with its experimental process, it’s furtive searching for wealth through refining over and over again different earth elements, could eventually lead to the scientific process. But at its core Alchemy always implied refining the human heart into a more perfect vessel, a place where the Divine Spirit could reside. Out of this came a love of knowledge for knowledge itself. From Gnosis, so to speak, to God.
Behind the Klementinum narrow lanes twist and turn, with no straight path to the Alstadt. We were like bees circling the hive, trying to get out of the wind and make it to the Astronomical Clock before the tolling of the bell. The history of the Astronomical Clock, or Orloj is as varied as Prague’s, with wars, fires, Nazi artillery and revolution exacting their toll. Originally built in 1410 the Orloj essentially a mechanical Astrolabium with a rotating face that traces the path of various celestial bodies, the sun and moon, across a brightly painted background. Inside the clock, a giant 365 toothed gear turns the zodiac. This gear turns a smaller 24 toothed gear that turns the sun and moon. This entire masterpiece has been burned down, destroyed, and rebuilt over and over again throughout its history.
Surrounding the Altstadt Ring and opposite the Astronomical Clock are stately buildings and churches- The Church of the Holy Lady and The Nikolaus Kirche. Today Prague is diverse international city: a couple of blocks away from the Astronomical Clock is the Sex Machine Museum. Sadly, we didn’t have time to go.
Unfortunately, we only had a weekend to spend in Prague, and it seemed as soon as we got there we had to turnaround and go back. Well, it really was too cold. I think it would be more pleasant to sit outside in a Beer Garden and drink a Pilsner Urquell in the sunshine. Or to get lost in a flea market somewhere in a less savory side of town. But that will have to wait until later.