My last post left off with me crossing the Charles Bridge from Prague’s Old Town to its Castle Quarter.
As a general rule, because I’m mainly interested in understanding what it’s like to live, day to day, in the various cities I visit, I tend not to spend a lot of time and money on admission to museums, cathedrals, and other historic tourist sights. But here in Prague, I just had to know what draws millions of tourists here. So I shelled out 250 koruna ($11.27) to get into the major sights that make up Prague Castle: St. Vitus Cathedral and the Old Royal Palace. On Sunday, 1 July 2018, when I first visited, St. Vitus was closed all day, but happily the ticket is a two-day pass, so I came back the following day for the cathedral. But first, I hit the Old Royal Palace, the residence of the kings of Bohemia. Since there hasn’t been a king of Bohemia in 370 years, the palace is, as Rick Steves’ guidebook accurately describes it, “a mostly empty historical shell.” But for a history major like me, there’s still plenty of interest in there, even if the whole palace is a mothballed museum piece (which it basically is).
But my real reason for wanting to come to the Old Royal Palace lay in one of the side rooms, the “Czech Office.” Back in 1994-1995, my sophomore year of high school, I took a European history class taught by my favorite high school teacher, Mr. Hall. One day when we were discussing the Protestant Reformation or the Counter-Reformation or the Thirty Years’ War or something, Mr. Hall mentioned an event with the tongue-in-cheek title of “the defenestration of Prague,” in which radical, intolerant Protestants tossed two radical, intolerant Catholic officials out of a window in this very building. (As if the real injury had been done to the windows, not to the men.) Mr. Hall also noted that this was a very obscure event that we wouldn’t have to remember, which of course ensured that I would remember it forever. I can’t tell you what the Thirty Years’ War was about or what its effect on subsequent European history was, but I still remember the Defenestration of Prague.
And so here I was in Prague Castle, during the 400th anniversary year of the defenestration of Prague, looking through the infamous window itself. For once, the English captions at the site (most English explanations at Czech historic sites are numbingly dull, even for history majors like me) added to my understanding and appreciation of the event.
“Defenestration” was a characteristically Czech way of resolving disputes, and one that, by design, was usually fatal to the losers. In the case of the defenestration of Prague, however, the two officials, as well as an unlucky assistant to them that the angry mob pushed out the window after his bosses, all survived the fall, and two of the three had no significant injuries at all. The dueling Catholic and Protestant propaganda machines then went to work: In the Catholic version of the story, the Virgin Mary herself interceded and guided the Catholics to the ground, miraculously unharmed. In the Protestant version, the Catholics were spared mortal injury only by the indignity of landing in a cart of manure that happened to be right under the window at the time.
The more rational, modern explanation for the men’s survival is that the ground outside the window was steeply sloped at the time. Physics-wise, a fall from the tall window arrested by a flat surface would probably have been fatal because of the force exerted on the human body when it came to an immediate stop after falling rapidly. But because the men fell down a hillside, they were able to slow down more gradually, reducing the stress on their bodies and saving their lives.
The ticket I bought also got me into a couple of secondary sights on the castle grounds: St. George Basilica, a smallish Romanesque church, and “Golden Lane,” a restored replica of the area within the castle’s fortified wall where soldiers, craftsmen, and servants once lived, now a mix of glassed-in dioramas and trinket shops.
And just past the Golden Lane, I got a quick peek at the Black Tower, the castle dungeon, just before it closed for the day.
And of course, I didn’t forget St. Vitus Cathedral, Prague’s most recognizable landmark, whose spires can be seen from all over town. I took a couple of exterior shots, and returned on Monday, 2 July 2018 to tour the interior.
So there you go. The tourist’s Prague, in two long blog posts.