Prague: Day Four, Part One - National Holiday

Old Town Square

Today is the Czech Republic’s national holiday - Czech Statehood Day - and the sky, at last, is blue.
       A bit of background:  On September 28, in 935 A.D., Czech Prince Wenceslas was murdered in a plot orchestrated by his treacherous brother Boleslav in a bid for power.  Entire families of Wenceslas’s supporters were murdered.  Granted, a few years later Boleslav had his brother’s remains transported to Prague, and pushed for his brother’s canonization as a saint... and the cult of St. Wenceslas began to spread (complete with our Christmas carol about Good King Wenceselas).  Which is why September 28th was chosen in the year 2000 as a state holiday:  the day of Czech statehood.
       It may be a holiday, but the sidewalk tilers and the sewer crew are working.  So are the street sweepers.
       On my way to Old Town Hall, I take some of the back streets I haven’t tried as yet.  It’s easy to find the right direction because the twin spiked steeples of Our Lady of Tyn are visible high above the other roofs.

       Old Town Hall was built in 1338; New Town Hall already existed then.  So it isn’t a question of being newer, but of being the town hall of Prague’s old district (Stare Mesto) or the new one (Nove Mesto).  The reason the old one interests me is its astronomical clock, which I’ve learned is not hidden by the renovation work, as I’d feared.  However, it only works on the hour, which it is not.  As for the tower, once the highest structure in Prague and a prime viewing point, it is closed for renovation.  So I decide to while away the time until the clock does its thing by going inside Old Town Hall to see the interior decoration.
       Of which there is much.  And as of the front door.  Everywhere you look.  The walls.  The ceiling.  The tiled floor.  Everywhere.
       In the Chapel of Virgin Mary, where mass was said before council meetings, for prisoners or for convicts before execution, a panel describes one figure as “Ste Anne, Jesus’s grandmother”.  Although this is true, it’s the first time in my long life that I’ve ever heard her called that; usually she’s just Mary’s mother, and the celestial link stops there.

       Up a few steps are displayed the innards of the original astronomical clock from 1410.  It affords an “up close and personal” view of the apostles.  The one with the serpent is St. John, the one with the spear is St. Andrew.  They’re mounted on rotating horizontal wheels, six to a wheel, with a second mechanism that rotates them so they face ahead as they appear at one of the two small windows, then pivot outward to face the spectators below.  The clock tower was built especially for them on the south side of the building... or rather the cluster of buildings, because Old Town Hall was actually a gradual amalgam of five individual burgher’s homes into a single unit as the years went by.
       In May of 1945, a large part of the town hall was completely destroyed by the Nazis during the Prague Uprising and has been lovingly rebuilt over the decades.  Right down to the amazingly intricate gilt-hinged door and beamed ceiling of the Old Council Hall.

Today the show on Charles Bridge as I cross isn’t the statues, or even yet another Oriental couple getting their honeymoon photos taken in full regalia.  The show is on the river below.  On the rapids just upriver from the bridge, several groups of kayakers and canoeists are practicing their white water skills under the watchful eye of rescuers ready to dive from two boats moored nearby.  It’s a free show watched from above.  Except for a few fishermen who seem to be more hopeful than successful.  I wonder what they catch in this river... and whether they eat it.
       There’s that same rumpled man sitting on the bridge, a dachshund in his arms, his hat upturned in front of him.  I ask if I can pet her, in English of course, holding out my hand, and he nods yes.  “Naïa,” he tells me, and nods at her.  I wonder what this man’s back story is.  Is he homeless?  Or just poor?  His age denotes that most of his life was spent under the Communist regime, and Communist pensions are frugal at best, as I saw in St. Petersburg, Russia.