On our last day in Prague, once the rental car had been safely returned and we’d resupplied ourselves with fresh tram passes from the machines at the train station, we decided that we’d visit some of the museums around the city. There are a lot of them, after all, and we like museums. There’s usually interesting stuff in them.
We didn’t plan to go to all of them together, though. The joy of having adult children is that everyone can simply scatter to the various places they actually want to see and then meet up later. So we sat down and figured out where we wanted to go and how we’d ultimately meet up for meals, since those are Fixed Points in the day and we don’t skip out on such things, and eventually we set off for our respective places.
Lauren had plans of her own for the first part of the day, though. She wanted to get her hair cut and after some investigation she found a place near our apartment that would do that for her, though on a cash-only basis that required a trip to the ATM. They did a nice job.
Kim, Oliver and I went to the Mucha Museum.
Alphonse Mucha was one of the leading figures in the Art Nouveau movement that spanned the decade or so on either side of 1900. It was a style that emphasized flowing lines and bright colors and could be found in everything from Paris Metro signs to American lamps to artwork spread throughout Europe, and it is a style I have always loved. Mucha was a native of what is now Czechia and spent a fair amount of time in Prague – he designed one of the stained glass windows at St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague Castle, and he created many of the decorative touches on the Municipal Building, which we walked by several times on our way to and from other places but never actually went inside.
Of course there’s a museum for him in the city.
The Mucha Museum is run by the same people who run the Kafka Museum, and if you buy your tickets to one at the gift shop of the other you’ll get a discount. We took advantage of this while we were at the Kafka Museum and this turned out to be a smooth move because it was raining pretty steadily when we arrived at the Mucha Museum that morning and, having tickets, we didn’t have to wait in the very long line. We showed our tickets, found a locker to stash our stuff while we wandered around, were warned about taking photographs and did the little “sure thing, gov’nor” dance that one does in Prague when so warned, and went inside where everyone was already busily taking photographs.
It's a pretty compact place, maybe three good-sized rooms not counting the gift shop or the lobby, but it is stuffed with art and you can easily spend a couple of hours there without feeling like you’re treading water. In the way back there’s a movie about Mucha and his life and times that runs on a constant loop – the seats were full but I stood off to the side and watched a good part of it, and it was interesting – but mostly there’s the art, which is displayed on the walls, in cases, and generally on every flat surface in the place.
Mucha was a prolific artist in a great many media, and there are paintings, prints, theatrical posters, newspaper pullouts, designs for larger projects, and all sorts of other things. The man had to eat, after all, and whatever commissions came his way he seems to have been glad to take.
One of the interesting things about the place is that you get to see Mucha as a working artist. There are a number of his rough sketches – sometimes with the finished piece next to it so you can compare – as well as photographic studies of models in various poses. It was a great place to explore.
I spent a fair amount of time in the gift shop, just wandering around and looking at what they had. There’s a lot of Kafka stuff in there as well, and between the three of us we ended up with a decent amount of items to purchase, though these were somewhat limited by the fact that we had only carry-on-sized luggage to get it all back home. The line was very long at the cash register and by this time the rain had stopped and Oliver and Kim wanted to press on to their next destination so they gave me the stuff they wanted and headed out.
So at this point, I’m at the Mucha Museum, about to spend an entertaining couple of hours happily meandering around central Prague with nowhere in particular to go – the best way to see a city, I think. Lauren is finishing up her hair appointment. And Kim and Oliver are headed back to the Jewish Quarter to finish the tour they’d started a couple of days earlier, before we left for Germany.
The Jewish Quarter of Prague goes back centuries and has a number of exquisite sites to visit, and the tickets that Kim and Oliver bought got them into five of them – more than you could really do in a single day unless you hurry. As someone who grew up in a largely Jewish area in the 1970s only a generation removed from World War II, an area that also included at least one family that had moved from Prague, and who is now a professional historian, I already know how this story ends and to be honest it just wasn’t something I had the spoons to grapple with while on vacation, so I chose to do other things. Perhaps I’ll see them if we ever go back. They looked like lovely places, and very intense.
One site that they visited on their first trip to the Jewish Quarter was the Maisel Synagogue, which was built in the 1590s as a private prayer house and now hosts part of the Jewish Museum, which describes the Jewish history in Bohemia and Moravia – regions that comprise modern Czechia – as well as the history of Jewish life in Prague.
Another was the Old New Synagogue, which is a name that only makes sense when you realize that it has been there for a while. It’s a danger you face when you name anything “the New Whatever” and then maintain it for long enough that it’s no longer new. Built in the 1270s – which tells you just how long Prague has had a Jewish community that this was the new one – it is the oldest synagogue still standing in Europe and is rumored to be supernaturally fireproof. This is the synagogue where legend has it that Rabbi Loew created his golem, which is a story worth reading.
The other place they visited on that first day was the Spanish Synagogue, which is much more recent. It was built in the 1860s in a Moorish style, and it is astonishingly gorgeous. It sits on the site of the synagogue that was older than the Old New Synagogue, and the Kafka statue with the little Kafka sitting on the shoulders of the big one is just outside.
While I was meandering around Prague and Lauren was finishing up her appointment, Kim and Oliver returned to the Jewish Quarter to see the rest of the things that their tickets gave them access to see.
One was the Pinkas Synagogue, which began construction in the 1530s and seems to have been continually renovated ever since, according to the sources I looked up when writing this. Perhaps the most striking thing about it today is that it is covered with names – 77,297 of them, each one a Jewish person from Bohemia or Moravia who was killed in the Holocaust during WWII. There’s also a museum on the upper floor with exhibits from the Jewish people who were taken from Czechia to the concentration camps, including drawings by children and the story of an art teacher who encouraged them, at least for a while. The Holocaust is receding from memory now, an event in the history books that in our rabidly right-wing extremist times people will occasionally look you square in the eye and deny that it happened. Such people are diagnosably psychotic and should be avoided at all costs. It is important to remember that it happened, that it happened to people who had names and lives and hopes, all of which were cut short by Nazis in the name of Fascism and a blisteringly evil strain of racism. It is important to remember their names. There is power in names. Names matter.
They also visited the Jewish cemetery in the Quarter, grown over with stones and greenery, a memorial to those who came before. Some of the gravestones date back to around the founding of the Old New Synagogue, and they are covered in symbols – if you can read the code, you can tell who the person was, what they did in life, who their family was, and so on.
There was also this door, which apparently was just a door on a building that one passes in that area, but the message is worth sharing.
The Jewish community of Prague was not limited to the Quarter, and one of the things that I noticed while I was walking around Prague was that you could always tell where there is now or had been once a synagogue, even if it was no longer there, because the Czechs mark the sidewalks with stone mosaics of Stars of David to let you know. It’s a nice way to remember.
Oliver, Kim, and I met up for lunch at Wenceslas Square after that – Lauren ate somewhere on her own, as her appointment was a long one – and eventually we all gathered together and went to the Museum of Alchemy.
The Speculum Alchamiæ, as it says on the sign over the door, is a fascinating little place that appealed to Kim because of she is a chemist and to the rest of us because it is just one of those weird little museums that exist on the periphery of respectability and make the world a more interesting place simply by virtue of the fact that they’re open and you can go through them. You have to make reservations – it’s a guided tour and the physical space if pretty limited – but if you ever find your way to Prague it’s worth the hour or so that you’ll spend there once you figure in the waiting and the gift shop. The tour itself is about half that long.
There’s a little courtyard in front of the museum where you can wait until your time is called, and we sat there for a while enjoying the day now that the rain had stopped. And then we went in.
You start in the gift shop, the way most museums are set up. It looks like an old apothecary and you are welcome to buy things to support the place but since you exit the same way we saved our purchases for the end. You can get everything from souvenir coins all the way up to alchemical potions which the staff insists are made to the proper specs from original recipes, so take that for what it’s worth.
You stand there with a group of maybe fifteen or twenty people while the guide goes through his introductory spiel and then he takes you back to what looks like a library in an old house, mostly because that’s actually what it is. And here he tells you about the history of the place – how it was an herbal pharmacy of sorts in the 1400s and then in the 1500s Emperor Rudolf II of Austria turned it into an alchemical laboratory and invited a bunch of his alchemist friends to hang out there. Such a place would naturally have been well hidden, however, since even for emperors there is a certain whiff of the out of bounds about this sort of thing, and sometime after the 17th century it faded from memory before being discovered again during street repairs in the late 1900s.
There’s a little statue in one of the bookshelves that the guide twists, which causes one of the bookshelves to open up and reveal a stone staircase heading down below the buildings and the street, and it’s all wonderfully atmospheric no matter how much of it you believe is true.
The guide takes you through a labyrinthine series of tunnels with side rooms full of equipment, sealed entryways to other tunnels, and assorted other alchemical-looking things, and he keeps up a constant patter of stories throughout. It’s all very entertaining.
Eventually we reached the end of it and took the tram back to our apartment where we started packing for the journey back to Wisconsin before heading out for one last dinner in Prague.
