#180abroad

I’d never been stung by a wasp before, and at first I didn’t know what happened. It was like a bolt of sheer electric pain coursing through my hand and up my arm. I managed to kill and flush the cursed thing (literally) before it could sting again or call for reinforcements.

I was able to wash and clean the puncture quickly--no real harm done--but my hand was throbbing and stiff for the rest of the day. Not a great start, but luckily things got better.

Prague Castle is on the far side of town from where we stayed, across the Vltava River. So, for the first time since we checked into our flat, we took the metro.

The metro doesn't go all the way to the castle, but that gave us a chance to enjoy a picturesque, if largely uphill, walk through the beautiful, shop-lined streets of the Castle District.

One of the shops was a Koh-i-Noor Hardtmuth--a major Czech pen, pencil, and art supply manufacturer. As a professional stationery fan, I had to go in.

Meanwhile, Jessica entertained her own professional curiosity at a nearby gingerbread museum.

There were also a lot of shops selling puppets and marionettes. The Czech people apparently have a rich history of puppetry dating back to the middle ages.

That doesn't necessarily make them less creepy, though.

Once we made it to the top of the hill, we had a great view of central Prague. As well the surprisingly close Eiffel Tower.

(It's actually the Petrin Lookout Tower, but it was directly inspired by the Eiffel Tower.)

Prague Castle has been an important center of power for centuries--first for the medieval Bohemian kingdoms and later for the Austrian Habsburg empire that eventually absorbed them. It was also the home of the first president of Czechoslovakia after the country gained its independence in 1918.

It's also huge--a sprawling complex of palaces, churches, and squares. By some measures, at least, it is the largest castle on earth.

Outside the main castle complex is the Castle Square, lined with former palaces of important noble Czech families. One is still occupied by the Archbishop of Prague. Many of the buildings are painted with an interesting "envelope" pattern that gives the smooth plaster walls the appearance of being made of geometrically carved stones.

In the center of the square stands an elaborate column erected as thanks to God and Mary for ending a plague. It seems innocuous enough, but it is actually stands as a reminder of Prague's subservience to Habsburg Austria, which was were the tradition of erecting these Marian plague columns came from. After Czechoslovakia gained its independence in 1918, a similar column in the Old Town Square was torn down by a celebrating mob.

The castle grounds are free to enter as long as you don’t mind going through a security checkpoint. Once inside, you can buy tickets that cover various “routes” or sets of sights. When we got in, there was a huge line at the first outdoor ticket vendor. But the second ticket vendor, just inside a nearby building, had almost no one in line at all. Besides us.

(Thanks for the tip, Rick Steves!)

Just as we entered the middle courtyard, we got to see the changing of the guard.

The centerpiece of the castle complex is St. Vitus cathedral. It is big and impressive like a national cathedral should be, and was also one of the slowest cathedrals to ever be built. It was started in 1344, and due to wars, plagues, and religious reformations, it wasn’t completed until 1929. You can see modern architects with business suits carved into the western facade–representing the men who made the final push to get the cathedral finished in honor of Czechoslovakia’s independence following WWI.

Besides its massive size, beautiful Gothic architecture, and everything else we’ve seen in so many other cathedrals by now, one of the coolest features to us was a stained glass window designed by–you guessed it–Alfons Mucha.

The center panes show a young St. Wenceslas being taught Christianity by his grandmother, St. Ludmila. The two young women at the bottom of the window represent the Czechs and Slovaks. And the sides tell the story of Saints Cyril and Methodius, two brothers who brought Christianity to the Slavic lands from Greece.

One of the brothers’ biggest problems in spreading Christianity was that the Slavs had no written alphabet. So Cyril, the younger brother, decided to invent one for them. Over the next few generations, that alphabet evolved into the modern Cyrillic alphabet, which is still used today in many Eastern European languages.

Sadly, the brothers’ lives didn’t go so well after that. When they returned to Rome to show the pope their new Cyrillic Bible, Cyril got sick and passed away. Methodius returned to Bohemia as an anointed bishop, but eventually a new pope came along and decided that the Cyrillic Bible was actually heretical. The church arrested Methodius and locked him away for years. He was eventually released, after which he spent the rest of his life quietly in a monastery.

So, if Wenceslas, Cyril, and Methodius are the three most-venerated Saints in Prague, why is the church named for St. Vitus, a 4th-century Sicilian boy who was boiled alive in tar?

(The legend holds that a rooster was thrown into the vat of tar with Vitus as a sacrifice to the Roman gods, so Vitus is often depicted with a rooster at his feet. The legend also holds that Vitus was miraculously saved from the boiling tar. But not healed, so he still died--just later.)

In 925 AD, Duke Wenceslas--a Christian ruler of the still largely pagan Bohemia--received a relic of St. Vitus as a gift from the king of Germany. Wenceslas built St. Vitus Cathedral to house the relic, and it became an epicenter of Christianity in Bohemia.

It may have helped that the Slavic pronunciation of Vitus's name sounded a lot like the name of a pagan Slavic god.

Other cool sights in the cathedral included a 400-year-old carving of the city of Prague as it stood in the early 1600s, as well as a massive silver tomb dedicated to another local saint: St. John of Nepomuk. John was a Bohemian priest who was murdered by King Wenceslas IV in 1396. The actual reason was most likely a disagreement over the appointment of a Benedictine abbot, but according to legend it was because John refused to divulge to the king what the queen had said to John during confession.

In any case, the tomb is staggeringly opulent. A huge crowd was gathered in front of it, and it was actually getting hard to move as we approached. Jessica was hit with a wave of claustrophobia and made her way through as quickly as she could, but I managed to stay behind a bit longer to get a good look.

I also managed to get a peek into the gorgeous (and strictly cordoned) Chapel of St. Wenceslas, where the saint himself is entombed.

On our way out of the cathedral, we stopped for a moment to ponder the theological and economic implications of coin-operated electric votive candles.

Back outside, we walked around the central courtyard to find the cathedral's spectacularly gilt south façade.

The next stop on the castle tour was the old royal palace. It was mostly empty, centered around a massive great hall that was once used for feasts, markets, and even jousting tournaments. Today, the palace holds the country's modest crown jewels, a throne room, and a room covered in painted coats of arms.

But the most important thing in the palace is a window. A window that helped spark the one of the bloodiest conflicts in all of European history--the Thirty Years’ War.

One of the few things I still remember from my high-school European History class is the Defenestration of Prague. Mostly because it taught me the word "defenestration."

Defenestration: (Noun) The act of throwing someone out of a window.

To me and all the other kids in the class, that was fantastic. In reality, of course, it was deadly serious.

Long story short: It is 1618. Under the terms of the Augsburg Settlement, rulers within the Holy Roman Empire could choose whether their state would be Protestant or Catholic. Bohemia is an Imperial state, and its rulers are Catholic. But much of Bohemia's nobility is Protestant, and they're tired of being ruled by Catholics.

So, following in the tradition of the Hussites 200 years earlier, the nobles go to Prague Castle and throw the Catholic rulers out of a window. One thing leads to another, alliances are invoked, opportunists join the fray, and soon all of Europe is embroiled in a brutal, convoluted war that kills millions--mostly German civilians caught in the middle.

In the hardest-hit German states, over half the pre-war population die by violence, plague, or starvation before the war ends.

The Peace of Westphalia--a series of treaties that finally ended the Thirty Years’ War in (appropriately) 1648--is seen by many as the beginning of the age of sovereign nation-states.

It’s kind of crazy to me that the idea of countries being independent entities with precisely defined borders and their own separate governments is only four or five hundred years old. But it’s true. Throughout the Middle Ages, Europe was more like a chessboard, with squares constantly being traded back and forth into increasingly large and convoluted hierarchies. A single marriage could join two countries together, and a single death could tear them apart again. One man could be the king of England, an heir to the throne of France, and also the descendant of a French duke. Does that make England part of France or France part of England? It took five generations of war to decided that the answer was “neither.”

You can’t really understand medieval and early-modern politics without adopting a much more fluid sense of what a country actually is. It’s still really hard for me to do, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying.

Anyway...

After the royal palace, we visited the Basilica of St. George--an old Romanesque church that served as the royal chapel before the construction of St. Vitus Cathedral. It is smaller, less crowded, and more intimate than St. Vitus. Among the old Czech rulers buried there is St. Ludmilla, St. Wenceslas's grandmother and the first Christian ruler of Bohemia along with her husband Bořivoj.

Our tickets gave us access to one more sight as we left the castle: a medieval shop-lined street called Golden Lane. The name comes from the goldsmiths who used to work their and serve the castle's opulent needs, but today it houses a wider variety of shops and museums. There were jewelry shops, of course, and a puppet shop that creeped Jessica right out.

The coolest part for me was a showcase of medieval arms and armor, which was housed in the long attic that ran across the length of the street. Jessica found it immediately claustrophobia-inducing, so I stayed back to take pictures while she went on to look at the other shops along the lane.

Having made it from one end of the castle to the other, it was time for us to decide what to do next. There was the highly recommended Lobkowicz Palace--home to the oldest and largest private art collection in the Czech Republic--but Jessica and I had been around enough at this point to know that we didn't have another museum visit left in us that day.

The option we had in mind was a visit to the monastic brewery of Pivovar Strahov. It may have been considerably cooler than the previous days, but we had still worked up a strong thirst walking around the castle. Some traditionally brewed beer from a 17th-century monastery sounded like just the right way to cap off our stay in Prague.

Of course, that meant turning around and walking all the way back up through Prague Castle and another half-mile uphill beyond. It was worth it, though.

I'd wanted to try their "most award-winning" dark lager, but sadly it was sold out. So instead, I opted for their mainstay amber lager. Jessica chose from the more adventurous seasonal menu a coconut wet-hop ale.

Both were good, but we each preferred our own choice.

Thoroughly spent, we called an Uber to take us back to our flat. Jessica tried to make small talk with the driver, but he cut her off with a cursing tirade against an aggressive cyclist on the road. Typical Slavic conversation atmosphere.

Overall, Prague was one of our most challenging cities, but it also left us wanting more. Even five perfect days would not have been enough, and with so much heat and so little sleep, we had been at a significant handicap. So instead of pushing ourselves to see one last thing, we contented ourselves to an early evening and an eager desire to return--preferably during spring.

Next Post: To Vienna

Our morning Auschwitz tour included an afternoon tour of the famous Wieliczka salt mines near Krakow. We were dropped off in Krakow with an hour or so for lunch, so we headed over to a nearby Costa Coffee to recover.

The Costas in Krakow are an interesting departure from the ones in the UK. The comfortably generic coffeehouse décor is the same, but the food is fresh and local--unlike the somewhat mass-produced-feeling fare in the UK. We each had  a ham, cheese, and tomato sandwich (fresh-made, not packaged) with blessedly cool iced coffees. I also sprang for a slice of “forest fruit” tart with raspberry, blackcurrant, redcurrant, and apricot. An unusual combination, but very tasty.

Stepping reluctantly out into the summer heat, we made our way back to the tour office and joined up with our group bound for the salt mines.

The trip out of town was a bit hectic. There was a bike race going on, and one of the streets cutting across central Krakow had been shut down. Our driver hadn't known, and we ended up stuck in a one-way side street with our bumper to the crowd-control tape. After calling back and forth with home base, our driver decided to just park the van and wait for ten minutes or so until the racers passed. He opened the van and several people hopped out to join the sidewalk spectators.

Jessica and I stayed inside the air-conditioned van. The exhausted part of me that was still reeling from the morning's trip to Auschwitz secretly hoped that the trip would be cancelled and we could head home for an early evening. But thankfully that didn't happen. It was a long, tiring excursion, but we both had a good time and saw some impressive engineering and incredible blue-collar artwork.

Tours into the mines had to be strictly timed for crowd control, so we had a few minutes to use the bathroom and chug some water. A misting station had been set up to help people stay cool.

Finally, it was time to enter. We took the stairs, and they seemed to go down forever. When we finally stopped descending, we were 64 meters--almost 20 stories--underground.

A huge source of wealth for the country since the Middle Ages, the salt mines are a source of national pride in Poland. The mirror-smooth, crystalline caves made of 90% pure salt are beautiful and fascinating, as are the surviving wooden cranes and other bits of old mining technology. But the obvious focus of the tour is the art.

For the past hundred years or so, the salt miners occupied their free time by carving strikingly intricate and well-realized statues. There are statues of contemporary folks, historical heroes, and religious icons. Looking at the distinctive style of the statues, I can’t help but think that the art designers for the Lord of the Rings movies could have taken heavy inspiration from these statues when designing the aesthetic of the dwarven art and architecture.

There are also a healthy handful of chapels. Like the Welsh slate miners, the Polish salt miners were intensely religious and God-fearing. But rather than make do with cramming as much church as possible into their off-days, the Polish salt miners filled the mines with churches that they could use every day.

And of course, everything from the ceiling to the floor was carved from the salt.

The crown jewel of the tour is the jaw-dropping St. Kinga Chapel, whose expansive walls are lined with remarkable recreations of iconic Christian art.

And, of course, the centerpiece within the chapel collection is a strikingly lifelike statue of the late Pope John Paul II. I haven't mentioned it yet, but Cracovians are absolutely nuts about their homeboy John Paul. To be fair, though, the adoration was pretty well earned. After so many centuries of being seen as a second-rate nation by the rest of Europe, for this deeply Catholic country to finally have a pope chosen from their own people must have been a point of transcendent pride and validation.

Anyway…

After an interesting hour or so touring the mines, it was time for us to queue up at the exit. The tour had taken us  a further 71 meters underground, down to a depth of 40 stories. There was no way we were going to be climbing back up. Fortunately, there was an elevator. Unfortunately, the elevator wasn't especially big or especially fast. So we had to wait.

When it was finally our turn, I foolishly thought that our long day of walking was nearing its end. But it wasn't. The walk from the exit queue to the elevator proved comically long. It felt almost as long as the rest of the visit put together. Some of us started joking that the tour was just a ruse and that around the next corner would be a group of guards ready to escort us into our new lives as indentured miners.

And then the dinosaur attacked. (Not really, that was earlier. Apparently there are several overlapping tour routes, and at one point we stumbled across part of the kids' tour.)

But eventually, one of the turns turned out to be the final turn, and the promised elevator bore us up into the setting sunlight--a quarter-mile walk away from the building we'd entered through.

I’m glad we got to go to the salt mine. But if I had to pick one mine in all of Europe to visit, it would still be Llechwedd slate mine in Wales. The Wieliczka salt mine tour was heavy on wowing visuals but light on actual information about the miners themselves, which was what made the Welsh mine tour so impactful for us.

On the ride back into town, we passed right by the flat we were renting. As tired and footsore as we were, we each anticipated the 15-minute walk back from the tour office in the muggy evening air with dread. As if on cue, however, the driver pulled over to drop another group off at a nearby hotel. Jessica and I hopped out with them and gratefully strolled the half-block back to our flat. We threw some frozen pizzas in the oven and watched Disney's The Princess and the Frog, which I'd never seen before.

The next morning, as we left our flat to spend our last day in Krakow, I stopped to take a picture of a construction sign that had been amusing me since we first arrived.

Before I go on, let me admit upfront that this says a lot more about me and my ignorance than it does about the Polish language or anything else. Throughout our trip, we've seen a lot of signs in a lot of languages. And for the most part, they all fell into one of two categories. Either I could at least sort of understand them based on context and linguistic similarity or they were completely unintelligible.

But with Polish signs, my first reaction is not "I understand this" or "I don't understand this," but rather, "Am I drunk right now?"

Anyway, our first stop of the day was a sober-yet-uplifting continuation of yesterday's themes: Krakow's Jewish neighborhood of Kazimierz.

The neighborhood--originally a separate walled town--was named for 14th-century Polish king Kazimierz the Great. It was Kazimierz who first opened up Poland as a haven for the Jews being oppressed throughout Europe (and whose likeness we'd seen enshrined in salt the day before). Poland's Jewish population didn't exactly have an easy time of things over the centuries that followed, but they were at least usually relatively safe.

In the center of Kazimierz's Broad Street ("Ulica Szeroka"), a monument honors the 65 thousand Jewish Cracovians who were murdered by the Nazis.

We visited the Remu'h Synagogue, which houses Krakow's Old Jewish Cemetery. (As a man, I was asked to wear a yarmulke while I on the premises, and I happily obliged.)

We were mainly interested in the cemetery, but we visited the synagogue first. It was remarkable. The Synagogue dates back to 1553, and it has been beautifully maintained and restored. You can even still see the original 16th-century frescoes adorning the upper walls.

Thanks to our guidebook, we also learned a bit about traditional synagogue design. Like Christian basilicas and Islamic mosques, synagogues face east toward Jerusalem. At the front of the synagogue is the ark, where the scrolls of the Torah are stored. In Orthodox synagogues like this one, the speaker stands in an ornate cage in the middle of synagogue, facing east along with the congregation. (In Reformed synagogues, the speaker stands in the front and faces the congregation.)

Outside, we learned about Jewish cemeteries, too. (Or at least the ones in Eastern Europe.) Unlike the neat rows of Christian cemeteries, the Jewish graves have a somewhat more organic organizational aesthetic. (This would be much more evident at the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague.) Most of the headstones were covered in small stones, which visitors place as a token of respect. We couldn't read the headstones, but some were clearly more notable by the mountain of stones placed on and around them.

Near the synagogue still stands the gravestone of Moses Isserles, the 16th-century rabbi who founded it.

For us, though, the most striking feature of the cemetery is also one of its newest--the walls. During the Nazi occupation, many of the Jewish graves were desecrated and smashed. After WWII, the caretakers did their best to restore the cemetery as much as possible. And as a memorial of the Nazi atrocities, they used the unsalvageable fragments of smashed headstones to line the cemetery walls.

Stepping back onto Broad Street, we found the place increasingly lively with visitors. Many were Jewish Americans, but there were plenty of diverse groups from around the world. This is the "uplifting" part of the "sober-yet-uplifting" thing I said earlier. For all the effort that the Nazis did to erase other cultures from the world, it was the Nazis who got erased. The Poles and the Jews are still right here where they've always been.

Near the Remu'h Synagogue is a bronze statue of a kindly looking man sitting contemplatively on a bench. The man is Jan Karski, a Catholic Pole and one of the first people to publicly speak out against the Nazi extermination camps--a charge so unimaginably heinous that the rest of the world didn't want to listen.

At the bottom of Broad Street stands the 14th-century Old Synagogue, the oldest Jewish building in Poland. It and the surrounding courtyard are conspicuously sunken below street level. It was built this way on purpose because medieval laws forbade Jewish buildings from standing taller than Christian buildings. So in order to make it as big as they wanted, the Jewish architects had to build down as well as up.

As fascinating as Kazimierz is, and as much as we no doubt would have enjoyed visiting inside the Old Synagogue and visiting all the other historic neighborhood sites, we had other things we wanted to get to on our last day in Krakow. So we bid farewell to the charming Jewish neighborhood and headed back north toward Wawel Castle.

The castle is huge and beautiful. Again, we didn't have the time or energy to justify buying a ticket to go inside, but there was plenty to see just wandering around the grounds, which were open to the public. Including the massive, Florence-inspired central courtyard.

Like the Palatine in Rome, Wawel Castle is built on top of a hill where an ancient Polish tribe is said to have lived. And as with the wolf-raised twin founders of Rome, Krakow has its own deliciously outlandish origin story. According to the legend, a fiendish dragon set up shop in a cave at the base of Wawel hill. The dragon demanded a weekly tribute of cattle, and if an offering was not made, the dragon would feast on the tribespeople instead.

The dragon was finally defeated by a clever cobbler, who fed the dragon a lamb stuffed with explosive sulphur. The dragon devoured the tainted lamb and was overcome with a thirst so great that he dove into the nearby Vistula and drank until he exploded.

King Krakus, the mythical founder of Krakow, was so impressed by the cobbler's ruse that he let the boy marry the princess and become the next king.

Today, a seven-headed metal dragon at the base of Wawel Hill spews a gout of flame every five minutes or so.

Leaving the castle behind us, we wandered back up to Market Square, where we had an early dinner at one of the touristy open-air restaurants. We're pretty sure it was actually the same Italian restaurant that Jessica ate at on her last night in Krakow eight years ago.

Given the prime tourist-trap location, I expected it to be a bit of a frivolous splurge--a celebration of our having successfully survived our first stop in Eastern Europe. But it turned out to be a thoroughly enjoyable and surprisingly affordable meal. In that way, at least, Krakow's Market Square is very much unlike the Italian cities it was built to emulate.

And we enjoyed a local Polish cider. A bit tart, as I recall, but not at all bad.

We headed back to our flat, but our day was far from over. We wouldn't be staying at our flat this night. We wouldn't be staying in any flat this night.

We would be taking the night train to Prague.

Next Post: The Night Train to Prague