The Magical Mystery Tour of Prague

As anyone who has read the travel brochures knows Prague is a Magical city. A fairy tale metropolis blending ancient, medieval, baroque, and modern all preserved in a way possible only in a place that surrendered to the Nazis without a fight. (Just kidding. It's obviously a lot more complicated, but this is a blog not a dissertation. If brevity is the soul of wit, then perhaps glibness is the essence of blogging)




My wife and I traveled to Prague at the beginning of November, and it was everything they say and much more that you have to find out on your own. I was a little worried that a 9 day stay in one city might get redundant, but the longer we were there the more we realized how much we hadn't seen and wanted to see.

I took lots of pictures, and unlike my other trips some of these came out pretty good. This blog is supposed to concentrate on the literary so I will in the future point out some of Prague's more literary and writerly past and present, but in a city with a multiplicity of picturesque castles, palaces, churches, cathedrals, etc. I think my best pictures turned out to be of a wall covered in graffiti.

The John Lennon wall in the Mala Strana (The Little Quarter) started out as a tribute and a protest. Shortly after Lennon was shot, and the Communists still ruled Czechoslovakia, people began writing Beatle lyrics and painting pictures of John Lennon onto a wall behind the French Embassy, and the government kept painting over it, but the people persisted and eventually the French Ambassador asked the Czech Government to leave the graffiti alone because he liked looking at it.

















So for over 25 years, and long after the overthrow of communism, people from all over the world continue to leave tributes to John Lennon who to the Czechs was an icon of the freedom that western democracy represented. (Nevermind that the FBI was spying on him and tried to deport him. We're talking symbolism here not reality).


The wall is about a block long and it's impossible to photograph the whole thing. These pictures are just a sampling, and from what I have seen of earlier pictures the wall is constantly changing, so if and when we go back I'm sure it will be very different. Next time I intend to bring a Sharpie.
There are places I remember, indeed.