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A short break in Prague

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.

Vienna

Due to the way the School holidays fell this year we had to take our post-Easter break before Easter, and so took the opportunity of four nights in Vienna. We'd never been in that direction, and linguistically were way beyond the limits of my flakey O level German.

Interestingly, I'd never been to a city for the first time before where I had read so much about it prior to going - and yet once there found what I had read to be of almost no relevance whatsoever.

The 1683 siege by the Ottoman Turks was almost the moment that Islamic armies entered Western Europe. The Viennese held out for two desparate months as the Ottomans tried to undermine hte walls and break down the city's defences, only to be relieved at the last minute by the combined forces of the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Wheatcroft's book is fascinating. However, the Vienna of today with the exception of one or two cathedrals and the shape of the Ringstrasse bears almost no relation to 17th Century Vienna. There are no historic walls, and nothing in what we saw around the city to mark the place where the siege was acted out.

Interesting historical possible factoid of the week. The walls which saved Europe (hurrah!) were paid for by the exorbitant ransom (boo hiss!) that we paid in return for Richard the Lionheart (hurrah!) when he was held in 1192 by Leopold V on his way back from the Crusades.

Next on my reading list, although I didn't actually finish it until on the way home, was Patrick Leigh Fermor's account of his walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople (although the first book concludes with him standing on the bridge crossing into Hungary).

Leigh Fermor had passed through Vienna in the March of 1934. I found a couple of streets he mentions, but little else as he is vague about cafes and hostels he frequented. His travels coincided with the rise of Nazism, certainly on the German leg of his walk, and Vienna did not feel like that sort of place at all.

I did read that at one point in 1918 Freud, Stalin and Hitler all lived in Vienna - who knows where?

 

The Vienna of The Third Man has also disappeared too. No piles of rubble remain - in fact (assuming a major rebuilding exercise has taken place on large numbers of grand 18th and 19th Century buildings) the place looks untouched.

I understand that the film The Third Man is actually used as a form of archive of the degree of devastation that the city had expeirenced by 1945. The wheel in the Prater Park is still there, and one of the clips in the opening credits looks across the front of the Town Hall across to the Votivskirche near where we stayed, but it didn't feel like the city of Harry Lime.

I had also started Max Hasting's book Catastrophe: Europe goes to war 1914 and I have to say that the Austrians don't come out of this very well. Opinions differ, but I think he must be close to the mark with the blame.

No, theVienna we found was very different. I loved the calm orderliness - even the roudy beer festival in the gardens in front of the Rathaus were not in least bit threatening despite a large dose of moustaches and lederhosen.

I loved the feel walking around the place. I got some black and white street photos which are upon as a set on flickr and some colour ones of the buildings in the gorgeous spring sunshine.