Interludio de Praga

 (Prague Interlude)

This is a non-Spain post, but it's still relevant. One of the reason we wanted to retire to Spain was to give us easier opportunities for travel; just about every major European city is no more than a three-hour nonstop on Iberia from Madrid. So this Christmas we decided to take our first "hey, sweetie -- let's decide to go somewhere in Europe at the last minute" trip, and took a trip to Prague.

There's no other way to put it: Prague is a staggeringly beautiful city, maybe the most beautiful city I've ever visited. It's not just the majestic castle on the hill, the Vltava River sparkling like a ribbon through the middle, or even the fairytale-setting Old Town Square. It's as if the entire city was built in one giant burst of Belle Epoque/Art Nouveau enthusiasm, then carefully preserved afterwards.  

I visited Prague over a dozen years ago, but that was on a whirlwind tour of the capitals of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire (Vienna, Budapest, Hungary), and I was so busy trying to “see everything” in just a few days that I don’t think I let the city properly sink in.

This time around, I spent most of the time with my mouth agape -- the near 0-degree Celsius cold notwithstanding – just saying to Amy over and over again, “This is just so bloody lovely….”

We came in part to visit the city’s famous Christmas market, and it did not disappoint. Grilled sausages of all shapes and sizes, mulled wine, hot mead, and a dizzying array of fried, baked, sugared and spiced dough goodies. Our waistlines are both going to take some time to recover.

This is trdelnik, a particularly Czech delicacy. It’s a yeasty dough which is twirled in strips around these large cylindrical rods, covered in cinnamon sugar, then slowly turned and grilled over coals….before they then stuff the whole thing full with Nutella, or berries, or ice cream, or all three. 

Those of you who know me well or who have ever read my old blog¹ know that I am an absolute fool for architecture and buildings. This is the National Museum on Vaclavske Namesti,² which is really well done and has some wonderful exhibits,³ but I spent easily half my time (and more than half of my pictures) gawking at the interiors.

One of Prague’s favorite sons is modern artist David Černý (CHER-nee), whose outdoor installations feature prominently in various locations in Prague. After coming across one or two of his pieces I almost went on a “Christmas trees of Madrid”-style quest⁴ trying to find all of his art, but many of the pieces are in far-flung locations throughout the city. His style is whimsical and satirical, and many of them have a kinetic component – the circular piece in the upper left, for example, is a gyroscopic tribute to a famous Czech gymnast and protestor against Soviet domination which spins about three gimbals.

This may be his most-visited piece in the city: A motorized bust of Franz Kafka that turns every few minutes to look at the viewer.

One of the sights we were most looking forward to seeing was the Alphonse Mucha museum. I’d never heard of Mucha before visiting Prague years ago; Amy -- a design major in college – had definitely heard of him and was eager. Mucha was one of the leading artists of the Art Nouveau movement.The famous actress Sarah Bernhardt so loved a poster Mucha did for one of her plays that he became “her” artist, doing all of her posters, and his reputation was made. He was fiercely patriotic, and spent much of his final years working on a huge piece called The Slav Epic, featuring famous episodes from Czech history. Unfortunately, that piece is not at the museum;⁵ it’s several hours away in a castle in Moravia. In any event, Mucha’s work is meticulously detailed and hauntingly beautiful, and I would encourage you to seek him out if you’ve never heard of him before.

This may be my favorite building in the entire city. It's the Municipal House (Obecní dům), and it's utterly magnificent. A little history: At its height, the Austro-Hungarian Empire ruled an area comprising parts of roughly 13 modern-day nation-states, including 11 different ethnic groups and 15 distinct languages. The Austrian Habsburgs⁶ were notoriously Germano-centric, and tried to standardize German language and culture across their domain, over -- as you can imagine -- the considerable resentment of their subject peoples. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, as the empire was in its decline, Prague’s city authorities pitched the idea of a civic center and performance hall that would be uniquely Czech. The city paid for the project itself without imperial funding, and they enlisted large numbers of Czech architects and artists to complete the project. And here's the great part: Although there was overall project coordination, each separate room/space got assigned to a separate team of artists and designers who got the opportunity to express their talents. 

The result is pure magic. Every aspect of the building -- from the floors to the light fixtures to the door handles to the wood paneling to the grilles to the very signage  -- is beautifully and exquisitely designed. I took something like 200 pictures of the interior, and could have easily taken 200 more. 

     

This might be the most magnificent room in the whole place: The circular vestibule, decorated with historical figures and allegories from Czech history -- and significantly and pointedly no Habsburg rulers, emperors, or aristocratic elites -- painted by our friend Alphonse Mucha. 

I could go on and on about the beauty of the place, but at some point these long blog posts become the 21st century equivalent of watching someone else's interminable slide show. The long and the short of it is that if you are at all interested in travel, history, and beautiful cityscapes, you should come to Prague. The city is gorgeous, the food is great (if a bit on the heavy side), the beer is epic (both Pilsner and Budweiser originated in Czechia), and I barely needed to make use of the four-week long crash course in Czech I took -- just about everyone here speaks English. So that's it for my Prague interlude; más España in the next post!

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¹https://robbtravelsandtalks.wordpress.com/

² …or Wenceslas Square. Yes, "Wenceslas" as in feast-of-Stephen Wenceslas. Although as we learned at the museum he actually wasn’t a king; Vaclav was a 10^th-century Bohemian duke who was known for his care for the poor. He got posthumously promoted, I suppose because “Good Duke Wenceslas” wasn't as catchy. ↩︎ 

³Including a really cool “time elevator,” where you walk into a circular room, then they project images from Czech 20^th-century history that make it look as if you are rising up through time. ↩︎

⁴See the previous blog post, “Trece Árboles de Madrid” (https://www.robbandamy.com/2026/01/trece-arboles-de-madrid.html)↩︎ 

⁵I say “the museum” – that’s actually a funny thing: The first Mucha Museum was founded around 2008-09. Apparently there was some sort of tiff between the founders and Mucha’s grandchildren, who own the rights to much of his art. The Mucha grandchildren then formed their own museum, but the original retained the right to use the name “Mucha Museum,” and obtained Ivan Lendl’s (yes, that Ivan Lendl’s) extensive collection of original Mucha pieces. The two museums continue to coexist separated by just a few blocks, and sit there figuratively glaring and spitting at one another.↩︎

⁶Yes, relations of the same Habsburgs that used to rule Spain. The split occurred under Carlos V (1500-58), who somehow found himself ruling an enormous hodge-podge of territories including Spain, the Low Countries, parts of Italy, and the Austrian lands. For the sake of administration -- and probably sanity -- he abdicated in 1556 and split the domain: His son Felipe II got Spain, and his brother Ferdinand received the Austrian lands.↩︎