But few would go back. Neither of us, I had to admit, would live in the idealistic but deprived Prague I had come to more than a decade before. We had both grown too spoiled.
Prague is its own biggest attraction, the gold-tipped spires and red-tiled roofs like the centerfold of a pop-up book, its spine the silver-gray Vltava. Now, scrubbed and polished, the city has never looked more attractive. “Even the French say Prague is beautiful!” a cabdriver crowed to me.
The best way to see Prague is to walk it from top to bottom. When my husband, Satu, arrived, we began at the Castle, where the blackened St. Vitus’s Cathedral flashed pink-beige flesh under its scaffolding. We lingered amid the short doorways of Golden Lane, where legend has it that Rudolf II once imprisoned an alchemist for failing to turn lead into gold, and ambled down the steep cobblestones of Nerudova Street toward the Charles Bridge. Hand-carved marionettes danced in the little shops on canal-crossed Kampa Island, sometimes called Prague’s Venice, which had been nearly restored after the devastating 2002 summer floods. A meander through snaking alleys so familiar I could have traversed them in a blackout led to Old Town Square, whose sparkling pink and yellow façades had never looked so much like a perfect box of petits fours. But it was at Frank Gehry’s “Fred and Ginger,” a recently built tower of concrete and glass comfortably snuggled against Art Nouveau neighbors as though it had been there all along, that I realized Prague has always been about change, about lead into gold.
In the 20th century alone, the city has successively been part of an empire; a German protectorate; a Soviet satellite; and two versions of an independent country. Prague even changes from day to night, when darkness forces its most dramatic elements into the foreground like a Caravaggio, the Castle perched on the hill like a high-set diamond. At night, Prague is calmer, its overwhelming detail subdued. In the light, you get exhausted just looking at Prague.
Today, Bohemia is a lot less bohemian than it used to be, but in some ways it has more texture. The absinthe-drinking “novelists” have been pushed out by real rents and real leases, but international entrepreneurs offer exotica from kimchi to kebabs. Much that was authentic has been packaged and polished. The Municipal House, now restored to shining Art Nouveau grandeur, was my favorite place for winter balls and hearing Smetana played in the hall named for him. But my only access this time was a formal tour and a 900-crown ($37) concert where workaday musicians sawed through part of Má Vlast in 59 minutes, 59 seconds. Still, music now tumbles from dozens of churches and chambers, with concerts practically every hour. Even the Velvet Revolution is being sold. At the new Museum of Communism, you can see a video of the famous key-shaking and buy purple wax candles of Lenin’s head that used to be sold table-to-table in pubs by a scruffy giant I think we called Petr.
But there’s still some Prague left in Prague. Only the city that bore Kafka would decide to create a Speaker’s Corner—and then argue about whether to put up surveillance cameras. And while Hollywood has often seduced it into playing places like Paris, Vienna, and Zurich, what other city rewards blood donors with two pints of beer? Or gets a good giggle out of a guy caught tossing bags of urine into a café’s courtyard and the owner’s frazzled attempts to capture him on videotape?
Urine tossers aside, the city has never been more welcoming. It’s lighter and brighter, and the people have lost their nasty. At a concert in the neo-Renaissance Rudolfinum, I was happily enjoying the Czech Philharmonic’s Dvorˇák from my obstructed-view seat when an elegant older woman begged me to switch places with her. “Please,” she said in beautiful English. “You are a guest in Prague.” Simple signs point visitors to the Castle, to the Charles Bridge, to Old Town Square. And in place of the word bohuzˇel, which means “unfortunately” and was used to deny even small requests (i.e., “Bohuzˇel, you cannot have potatoes instead of dumplings”), is a linguistic novelty: samo-zrˇejmeˇ, “of course.”
“Samozrˇejmeˇ,” a wine tasting could be arranged for two people, a waiter told me, even though the sign said you needed ten. “Samozrˇejmeˇ,” I could see a room, even though the hotel was fully booked. And just for variety, “No problem,” said a waitress when I finally did ask for potatoes instead of dumplings.
Which doesn’t mean the Czechs have lost their trademark cynicism. Despite their functioning economy and stable democracy, a survey found they are the most pessimistic people in post-Communist Europe. “Skepticism is in our DNA,” said my friend Honza one night over homemade slivovice.
It’s easy to understand. Sometime before the tenth century, the Princess Libusˇe envisioned “a great city whose fame will touch the stars,” a city that would make armies “bow their heads.” But armies never did much bowing. Sitting delectably at the center of central Europe, Prague has belonged to the Holy Roman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, been plunder for Germans, French, and even Swedes. Twice betrayed in the last century—first when Europe gave them to Hitler, then when they were left to the Soviets—the Czechs have a well-developed sense of impermanence.
The beauty of black-and-white Prague, the Prague of no distractions, was that it made life’s little moments stand out—running into a friend on the tram and spending the afternoon at coffee was like finding a single sprig of dark green mint at the vegetable stand; watching the pears turn gold in my grime-spattered courtyard inspired the same kind of awe as the homemade dresses of gossiping girls in the bathroom at a winter ball. Those moments still live in this noisier, fuller, more complicated city. They are just a little harder to find.
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