Spirit of a Place Called Prague

Spirit of a Place Called Prague by Martin Friš, translated by Hedgie's Information Services

"Florence is as elegant and refined as a Boticelli painting. Venice is splendid and sensuous, like a painting by Titian ... Vienna is merry and lively like an Offenbach Operetta...," said Ernest Denis. And Prague? A.M. Ripelini calls Prague magical but Ernest Denis says she is a city of tragedies. The magic and tragedy are encoded in the labyrinth of twisting streets in Prague's Old Town. Every stone here speaks. Upheavals and revolutions were more frequent, passions more intense, battles more furious and fierce than anywhere else, because nowhere else was victory so tied to survival.

The idea of "Genius Loci," the spirit which inspires a given place, forms its personality, and unifies its parts and fragments into a whole, seems to have been forgotten in modern times. Yet the past, the deeds of those long dead, have a magical influence on those born in the same place centuries later. Genius Loci is the interaction of those who are related by physical contact, by local tradition, and by their history, as the same problems, formulated by the facts of geography, are posed to successive generations.

Physically, Prague sits astride its silver-hued river, crossed by two parallel ridges. The river, known abroad by its German name, the Moldau, is called the Vltava, its older Celtic name, by residents. Flowing from South to North, the Vltava makes a detour around the quarter of Holesovice, forming the letter P. The heart of Prague lies at the junction point of this P. Here the 14th century Charles Bridge connects the Old Town to the Lesser Quarter or Mala Strana. The nobility built their palaces along the river here and on the steep slopes leading up to the Castle, which dominates the skyline.

Some million years ago, a cosmic body approached this place from the East. Just before impact, it split into two halves which carved the two parallel ridges. The whole city lies in a shallow crater formed by this cosmic collision.

Astride the Fault

Some of the great ideas of European civilization were born in Prague. Here the monolith of the medieval church started to crack and splinter. Ideas of religious plurality were followed by concepts of religious tolerance, and of a secular peacekeeping alliance, the League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations. How did it happen that these ideas were born in this place?

Prague sits atop a cultural fault line which separates Eastern and Western Europe. On the surface, the line seems to separate the Germanic population to its west from the mostly Slavic population on its east. However, the division is more ancient and much deeper.

Bohemia, the province surrounding Prague, was the farthest northeast reach of the Roman Empire in its heyday. Later the Roman Empire split into Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire along this line. The fracture runs from Danzig across Poland, south through Prague to Austria, and ends in Bosnia. In Sarajevo this north-south fault meets another dividing line, separating the Muslim population to the south from the Christian north. The two lines form an inverted T carved across the face of Europe. Like earthquakes erupting along geological faults, many European wars started along the arms of this T.

Prague has been pounded by alternating waves, from the west and from the east. In 863 AD two monks, Cyril and Methodius, were invited from Constantinople to Prague to convert the Slavs to Christianity. They created a variant of the Greek alphabet called Cyrillic, used wherever the Eastern Orthodox church became dominant. This cultural and linguistic divide is visible today in the Serbian and Croatian languages. They are the same Slavic language with same vocabulary, one written in the Roman alphabet and the other in Cyrillic.

Cyrillic and Eastern Orthodoxy were not to become dominant for the Czechs, however. They were pulled West with the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. During the golden period of Emperor Charles IV's rule, Prague was the capital of that empire, flourishing culturally, intellectually, and economically. Prague's Gothic architecture, its Charles Bridge and hundreds of medieval spires, are the signature of this era.

Some of the great upheavals of later European history started in Prague itself, as the pendulum of power continued to swing first one way, then the other.

Three "defenestrations" set these changes in motion.

The first defenestration marked the beginning of religious wars which was precursor to the Reformation. One hundred years before Martin Luther, a Bohemian priest named Jan Hus had preached radical reform of the Catholic church. The Church had burned him at the stake and was now increasing its repression of his followers, the Hussites. In defiance, two Catholic councilors were thrown out the Old Town Hall windows.
In the two turbulent, independent centuries that followed, Bohemia repudiated Western influences. Christian groups independent of Rome were created and concepts of religious pluralism and tolerance emerged.
The second defenestration, two hundred years later, marked the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. At it's end Prague surrendered and became part of the Hapsburg Empire; Religious freedom was crushed by the Catholic Counterreformation. Prague's glorious baroque architecture is the stamp of these victors.
The third defenestration, in 1948, was the assasination of the Czechoslovak secretary of state Jan Masaryk by KGB agents. This was their opening move in the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia. It broke the WWII alliance of East and West against the Nazis, leading to formation of NATO and to the beginning of the Cold War. Once more, the East dominated Prague. The Soviet architectural legacy: drab prefab high-rises on the city's outskirts.

Prague as a Volcanic Fissure

The frequency and violence of these periods of change created something unique. Like the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the oceanic geological fault line between the North-Atlantic and European plates, where molten material constantly erupts from the earth's core, building new land, so the cultural fault line seems to be a perpetual source of new ideas.

How does Prague's Genius Loci give birth to these ideas?

Countess Suttner, born in the 19th century in the Kinsky palace, located in the Prague's Old Town Square, dedicated her life to the idea that international conflicts could be resolved by negotiation or court proceedings, rather than by armed conflict. She was instrumental in founding the International Court in the Hague. When Alfred Nobel inaugurated his Peace Prize in 1905, she was the fifth recipient.

When I first heard her life story, I realized that the same idea, the same effort, had been launched from this same city over 400 years earlier.

In the period of independence after the first defenestration, the Hussite king, George of Podebrady, attempted to create a secular alliance to replace Rome's role as European unifier and arbitrator. Was it mere coincidence that two of Prague's residents should have been inspired with the same idea?

In the stacks of the Charles University library in Prague, I discovered Countess Suttner's book, Disarm, containing the following passage:

"In the fifteen century, a thought occurred to a certain king to create a Peace League. It was George of Podebrady, who wanted to bring to an end the fight between the pope and emperor [of the Holy Roman Empire] and turned with such a proposal to Louis XI, who however declined his cooperation.... "

Thus Genius Loci, posing the same problem to a Hussite king and a 19th century countess, united them in common cause. But just as George's efforts did not prevent the eventual victory of the Catholic Hapsburgs, Suttner's work did not prevent WWI. Yet one of history's ironic twists connects their struggles in another way: WWI destroyed the very same Hapsburg empire whose ascendancy George had tried to prevent.

Their idea survived, however. In 1945, it saw fruition when the United Nations was born in San Francisco, coincidentally a city of literal fault lines. If the UN today often fails to prevent armed conflict, as did King George and Countess Suttner in their times, we must not despair. Out of the violent cauldron of Prague's history new ideas emerged, These ideas survived the centuries by taking peculiar, unpredictable turns, like pedestrians threading their way through the crooked streets of Prague's Old Town and suddenly emerging in unexpected places.

About the author

The author was born in Prague. He left Prague left to study mathematical logic in Poland and the Netherlands. He returned and has lived here in Prague for over 50 years. While his profession is mathematics and computer science, his avocation is literature. His Prague then is the city of Kafka and Meyrink. He contributes his knowledge of Prague to Hedgie's information service.

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