It’s time to board our flight. Why are we the only ones at the gate aside from four over excited teenage boys rocking full body gold lamé – we don’t ask. I check my boarding pass. This is what happens when you get up at 4:30am: you confuse your seat number, 8C, for the gate number 6D, which is at the other end of the concourse and on a different floor. We arrive as boarding starts. You could say it was perfect timing, but I prefer it without the heart attack.
We’re leaving Prague after a busy five days. The airline is Eurowings, Lufthansa’s low cost (it’s all relative) arm. Being German run, it is well organised, unlike the bun fight I remember from flying Ryanair one time. The first and last time. The PTSD lingers.
The old town is positively heaving with tourists, mostly European, though it is still a destination for sad Brit-boy stag parties wandering aimlessly and shouting. We see a dozen extras from Dazed and Confused wearing t-shirts with a bare chested big bellied picture of James, who looks like a real catch. I want to tell the bride, whoever she is, to run very fast. We witness one “hen” party tottering over the cobblestones and they all look like they’d rather be at home watching Love Island. Those cobblestones are rugged and tough on your feet. Scott is keen for us to hire bikes, but when I see people juddering along, possibly losing teeth, I lose enthusiasm. I fear the flapping of my bingo wings would give me so much lift I’d take off.
A walking tour is a better bet and local Mikel takes us around the old town to, among other places, the Jewish Quarter. While the Nazis plundered Jewish artefacts from other occupied cities, Hitler preserved the Jewish Quarter in Prague as a “Museum of an Extinct Race”. I guess the laugh is on him, as there are six synagogues still operating. That said, the Old Jewish Cemetery is thought to hold 100,000 bodies although the 12,000 tombstones indicate they are buried between six and twelve bodies deep.
The most popular site in the old town is also, according to google, one tourists rank among the most overrated attractions in Europe. The Astronomical Clock on the tower of the old town hall dates back to 1410, reason enough, I would think, to be interesting. It’s complex. It shows four different times known as Old Czech time, planetary hours, sidereal time – useful only to astronomers – and German hours, useful not just to Germans but all of us as it shows the current time, marked with 24 golden Roman numerals along the circle of the astrolabe. The clock not only tells us what time and day it is, but also tracks the movement of celestial bodies like the Sun and Moon. Wow. So much information. Why then do people think it’s overrated? I’m not sure what they expect, but thousands turn up on the hour to watch the four figures that flank the clock, vanity and greed on the left, death and lust on the right, come “alive”when the skeleton (death) rings the bell. The two blue doors at the top open, and for 30 seconds the twelve apostles pass by, presumably trying to drive out vanity, greed and lust. Maybe that’s why people don’t rate it. They’re happy being vain, greedy and lustful.
Kafka, the novelist was born in the Jewish area and there’s a statue commemorating him there. He was a depressive and morose bugger, as you will know if you’ve ever read Metamorphosis. Consequently there’s another sculpture of Kafka that takes you by surprise. If you come at it from a certain angle, looks like he’s hanging, but then you realise he’s holding on by one hand. This is the work of Czech artist, David Černý.
In recent years Prague has become a bit of an exhibition ground for Černý’s unusual and frequently provocative and controversial sculptures. Of course I love them. If you follow my instagram you’ll have seen one already: two men pissing into a pool the shape of the Czech Republic. We stumble across Černý’s work all over the city, but still see only a fraction of it. There’s a prominent statue of St. Wenceslas on horseback at Wenceslas Square, but Černý turns tradition on its head, literally, with a sculpture that has horse upside down.
Butterfly Effect is an installation of two Spitfire aircraft fuselages fitted with butterfly wings, attached to the sides of a mega store. Every few minutes the wings move, reminding us of the butterfly effect. In the words of the artist, referring to the Czech pilots who flew in the Second World War: “A small fighter plane with a skillful pilot can ignite the fire of a battle that will eventually sweep away even a large aggressor. The butterfly effect is the theory that the flapping of an insect’s wings can trigger a chain of events that will cause a hurricane on the opposite side of the planet.”
Never mind the Charles Bridge, or Prague Castle, or even the Astronomical Clock, all groaning under the weight of tourist expectations, Černý’s work alone is worth the trip to Prague.
