We were fortunate to be able to bags a few days in Prague as our post-Easter break. Lovely city.
The famous views up and down the river are certainly well worth spending time enjoying, whether by day...
...or night.
It was quite a breath of fresh air to be in a city with beautiful historic buildings, but with little of those over-zealous symbols of Empire and obscure military victories.
As is our norm for this type of trip, we spent a lot of time on foot and digging out some of the smaller galleries and less touristy eateries. Certainly we ate well and the prices were very reasonable. However, here was a city that has been "done to" by more than its fair share of invaders.
I didn't take any photos of the Church of St. Cyril and St. Methodius which was the final stand of the men from SOE who had assassinated Reinhard Heydrich, the brutal Nazi Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The bullet scarred window slot of the crypt is still marked with lights and ribbons as a memorial to the men involved. The crypt itself is a sombre place. Wikipedia has all the information you might want to read here.
We wanted to walk some of the streets that Kafka had walked in his time in Prague, which led us around the old Jewish Quarter and across the river to the Kafka Museum. I found the Spanish Synagogue both beautiful and moving. There was no hype in the matter of fact documenting of the transportation of the vast majority of the Jewish residents to various concentration camps to meet their ends, leaving these remarkable buildings as testimony to a once thriving community.
And up by the Church of Saint Ludmilla we walked round a vibrant Easter Market and ate pizza (indoors to avoid the rain). We then stumbled upon another memorial to the Capek brother, Josef and Karel (who came up with the word 'robot'). Josef died at the ands of the Nazis for his artistic and political views, his brother Karel had died of pneumonia before the Germans arrived. They were so outraged that he had had the temerity to die without their involvement that they arrested his wife instead.
But, as usual in a bustling city, it is great to walk round and take photos - locals going about their days up and down to the Metro, and selfie-obsessed tourists unable to record their presence in a historic place without snapping themselves in the foreground for posterity.
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