Introduction to Prague

Entrance to the Municipal House/Smetena Hall.
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We’ve been in Prague for 24 hours now, enough time to begin to appreciate both the beauty and the sometime suffocating crowds of this enchanting city. Our apartment is the renovated top floor of a large building just around the corner from Staroměstske Naměsti, the heart of old Prague and the area most filled with the countless tourists who flock here in August. We knew when we rented it that it was a fourth-floor (that is fifth floor, the way we count floors) walk-up with no elevator. We hadn’t really counted on the 12-foot ceilings in thinking about how high that would be: 100 steps exactly. I think we will plan our excursions carefully and try not to forget guidebook or umbrella or camera on the way down.

The Vltava from Mala Strana.
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Jeremy and Haley just arrived from New York yesterday, so they crashed early, but Doug, Nathaniel, and I went to hear an up and coming countertenor named Philippe Jaroussky sing music of Zelenka at Smetena Hall, the largest concert space in Prague. It was too large a space for baroque music, but it was beautifully performed, and the building it’s in is quite special. Called the Municipal House, the name gives no idea of the fabulous Art Nouveau décor throughout.

This morning Jeremy, Haley, and Nathaniel went off to see the museum of medieval torture instruments, and Doug and I explored Josefov, the old Jewish Quarter. Most of the old streets of Josefov were razed at the end of the 19th century and the boulevards are now quite elegant with decorated Art Nouveau building facades overlooking them. A number of synagogues and the old Jewish cemetery survive. Bruce Chatwin, in his book Utz, says these monuments “far from being destroyed by the Nazis, were spared to form a proposed Museum of Jewry, where Aryan tourists of the future would inspect the relics of a people as lost as the Aztecs or Hottentots.”

Tyn Church in Old Town Square.
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My guidebook tells me that of the 120,000 Jews who lived in Czechoslavakia in 1939, 70% were deported and killed. After the war, many left for Israel, and there are now only about 2,000 Jews living in the Czech Republic.

Nathaniel brought us to a traditional Czech restaurant this evening before we all went to hear Dvořak and Mendelssohn at another fine concert hall, dthe Rudolphinum. It was a good dinner, but my body is crying out for some salad. Today, I’ve had sausage and cheese for breakfast, marinated cheese and peppers with beer for lunch, and goulash with dumplings and more beer for dinner.