Pragably Not True Tales

There is actually a Wikipedia entry on the defenestrations of Prague. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestrations_of_Prague

Fenster is German for "window" and defenestration is a throwing of a person out of the fenster.  The window pictured above was the site of the defenestration of 1618.  Up on castle hill a group of Protestant/Czech/Bohemian/ guys threw a few Catholic/Hapsburg-lovin'/LandStealin' guys out the window.  They lived.  According to the throwers, they lived because they fell in a giant dung heap.  According to the thrown, they were saved by angels. 

The View From The Defenestration Window on Castle Hill



The first Defenestration of Prague (1419) involves a bunch of Hussites throwing the (Catholic) town council members out of the window of the town hall.  Jan Huss (founder of the Hussites) had been burned at the stake just four years before.  Hussites were a pre-Luther group of what we would now call Protestants who blended religious reform with Bohemian nationalism.  Hussites are essentially who came over to found Salem, North Carolina from Moravia (which is either east of  Bohemia or Eastern Bohemia depending on the time period).

Jan Huss Statue in Main Square (near Town Hall)

Town Hall

This very fancy, all-silver sarcophagus is that of St. John of Nepumuk who was the queen’s confessor (14^th C).  When the king demanded to know what the queen’s sins were, Nepumuk refused to tell and was put to death.  A few hundred years later when the Catholics were looking for someone to capture the public’s minds to rival Jan Hus, they happened to be doing some arranging of graves and found that Nepumuk’s tongue (that secret-keeping tongue) remained alive, pumping blood and here it is reliquaried to this day. 

Yes, that's THE tongue.



Lest the reader being to think that Christians have a monopoly on Pragably Not True Tales, I present The Prague Golem.  From Wikipedia: “The most famous golem narrative involves Judah Loew ben Bezalel, the late 16th century chief rabbi of Prague, also known as the Maharal, who reportedly created a golem to defend the Prague ghetto from antisemitic attacks^[10] and pogroms. Depending on the version of the legend, the Jews in Prague were to be either expelled or killed under the rule of Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor. To protect the Jewish community, the rabbi constructed the Golem out of clay from the banks of the Vltava river, and brought it to life through rituals and Hebrew incantations. The only care required of the Golem was that he can't be alive on the day of Sabbath (Saturday), rabbi Loew once forgot to remove it and he became furious. A different story tells of a golem that fell in love, and when rejected, became the violent monster seen in most accounts. Some versions have the golem eventually turning on its creator or attacking other Jews.^[10]
The rabbi then managed to pull the shem from his mouth and immobilize him. The Golem's body was stored in the attic genizah of the Old New Synagogue, where it would be restored to life again if needed. According to legend, the body of Rabbi Loew's Golem still lies in the synagogue's attic.”
 

 

Old New Synagogue on right (stairs to the attic for the Golem)

 Old New Synagogue from the other side

Rabbi Loew's Grave
Below are some more photos of the cemetary- just because it's beautiful.
Maya says the grave stones stick out at everywhich angle, as inside a geode. 

Cerny

 Before this trip to Prague I had seen a few works by David Cerny but I did not know him by name.  I learned through the interwebs that his only piece in the USA is in Charlotte, NC.  Road trip, anyone? 

These guys' hips rotate and you can text a message to them and they will pee it out for you.  They are peeing into an outline of the Czech Republic.

 

 

Some say this is Freud, some say Lenin.  Cerny won't say. 

 

This one is for Kafka

 These are of the piece in Charlotte--"Metalmorphosis".

 

Praha ha ha ha ha

Our journey to Prague began very early in the morning- the snow still falling, as it had been for a couple of days.   All 22 of us piled on the bus to the Ubahn, and then to the train which stopped just long enough for us to hop on and find our seats before it took off again.  The four of us had a compartment that seated 6 so we spent the rest  of the 4.5 hours hoping no one else would join us (no one did)—and sleeping, and looking out the window at the train-window-picture-perfect snow covered landscapes.  Gabe brought it to my attention a couple of weeks ago that there are no evergreens around so the snowy forests are heavier on top and one can see further into them.  We began to see evergreens about 3 hours into our ride.  This is a photo I stole from the internet of the Vienna woods.

We had a short walk from the train station to our hotel on Wenseslas Square.   Wenseslas square was the sight of both the Prague Spring (1968)

and the Velvet Revolution (1989)

—a lot of political protest against Communist regimes and horrible brutality on the part of the communist soldiers and plain-clothesed police. The Czechs were under Communist rule for 40 years.  However, Prague is no Bratislava.  Prague is an entirely touristic city.  There were hundreds of tourist groups, their leaders with brightly-colored umbrellas or silly hats.  Everyone spoke English first to us. The streets were lined with tourist-oriented shops selling crystal, beer mugs, garnets, and Czech kitsch.  Our hotel was directly across from Starbucks and down from McDonalds.  In fact, the Communism museum advertises itself-with intentional irony- as between the McDonalds and the Casino.  Ughhh.
Prague almost makes up for this capitalist/touristic grossness with its amazing architecture.  The Tyn church rises up behind the main square with....aw hell, Disneyesque Sleeping Beauty spires.

However, the high-Gothic basilica of St. Vitus Cathedral up on the castle hill is simply the most stunning space I have ever been inside.  And I could sit in the nearby Romanesque interior of St. Georges all day and watch the light change- with or without tourists.

an aisle in Vitus

Vitus Original Gothic

Vitus Neo-Gothic

St. Vitus is interesting in that half is original gothic from the 14th Century and the rest is a somewhat neo-Gothic and added to over time and finished in the 19th C.  So, you can stand in the middle and flip between the two--but do not admit it if you like the neo side better!


 
 St. George's Frescoes  (12th Century!)






St George's from the pews.  With crypt below.  Charles IV here.
 St. George's

Okay- clearly Prague is going to take more than one post.....more soon...