From here, it was all downhill, literally, but not figuratively. We stopped at Loreta Square to discuss the history of the Czech Republic, and of the important buildings in the area. The country of Czechoslovakia was formed in the aftermath of World War I when the victors carved up the lands previously controlled by the losers. The Hapsburg Austrian-Hungarian Empire was chopped up, and Czechoslovakia was created. For twenty years, its residents enjoyed a peaceful existence. Then Hitler, after first claiming that the Sudatenland which overlapped the Czech-German border, decided that all of Czechoslovakia rightly belong to Germany.
The Nazis controlled the country until May of 1945, when the Allied armies, American and Soviet, kicked them out. Unfortunately for the Czech people, their former democratic government was not able tore-establish itself for long because in 1948, after the Potsdam Conference when Stalin, Churchill, and Truman decided how the spoils of this war would be divided, the Soviets effectively controlled the country through the Communist Party. Katka, who was able to weave her experiences and those of her family during the war, post-war Communist era, and the new democratic period which began in 1989, said that Czech people tended to just "go with the flow" during the Communist period. Like in East Germany, you could be "ratted out" to a Stasi-like police force, and some dissidents ended up in forced labor camps similar to those operated in Siberia by the Soviet Union.
Czechs were (and still are) voracious readers. But when the Communists took over, books were carefully screened and content censored, so the quality of writing diminished. On the first Monday of every month, new
books would appear in Prague bookstores and were quickly swept up, even though they didn't represent the high-level literature that the country's writers might have produced in a democratic society. Some members of noble families who had long established ties to the kings, and who had flourished in the democratic state after WW!, fled the country. Some commoners joined them, including a somewhat bizarre, but interesting character, who engaged us in conversation in the cafe where we lunched on Saturday. Some of them returned after the fall of Communism (when the state nationalized all private real estate holdings) and tried to get their property back. Some were successful, including the Schwarenberg family whose palace was donated to the city after the family renovated and restored to its pre-Communist era splendor.
Just down hill from the Loreto Square, is the church of the same name. Part of Catholic lore is that the angels picked up the house of Mary (Mother of Jesus) in the Holy Land and flew it to Loreto, Italy. Then "knock-offs" of this little home apparently popped up all over Europe.
"Prague Castle,", our next stop, is one of the city's major tourist attractions. It's not a single, fairly-tale, Disneyland type castle, but a huge complex comprised of several buildings, including the famous St. Vitus Cathedral, and the offices of the Prsident of the Czech Republic. We entered the castle grounds at a gate guarded by two armed soldiers in sky blue uniforms. Like the guards at Buckingham Palace, these guys stand stone-faced while tourists pose for pictures next to them. (According to Katka, the guards never lose their cool, even if women drape themselves all over them).Construction of St. Vitus Cathedral began in 1344, but came to a grinding halt when the architect for the project died. No qualified successor was available to take over, and it was nearly 600 years later (1929) when the church was completed. In the morning, throngs of tourists were lined up waiting to get in, so we continued down the hill, past the Toy Museum and out of the complex. When we returned later thatafternoon, we found few visitors to the castle complex, but the church had closed to visitors early because a wedding was taking place inside. The Toy Museum wasn't open either, so we simply retraced the route we'd followed earlier in the morning and headed back to our hotel, ending our first day as tourists in Prague.
(You'll find photos of Prague in the on-line album or you can view them in the mini-slideshow window in the trip blog).
