The Spectre of Old Town Walking through the dense network of passages and streets of Prague’s Old Town, I can hear the ‘click, clack, click, clack…’ of sturdy soled shoes as they hit the cobbled pavement. The sounds of my feet underneath me are reverberating against the handsome stuccoed townhouses, echoing through the portals of Baroque palaces, and diminishing in some sheltered courtyards. Alone with my thoughts, the methodical rhythm of my gait synchronizing with my heartbeat as I both leisurely, yet determinedly, make my way through the heart of the city and to my next destination. People today flock to Prague, for its picturesque, historic centre, but Prague is not a relic, it is an alive force that continually changes as its environment requires. The question therefore becomes, are the changes of the Golden City perceptible to us? Of course, before it could be “The Golden City”, there had to be a city to gild, and before that, there had to be a settlement to coalesce into a city. Prague today was not always one entity. Even its historic core was once fractured and independent, like Buda and Pest. Though not the oldest of the settlements, and today, not even the most densely inhabited, Old Town continues to conjure up almost metonymic associations of the city. Prague was already an early medieval centre of trade and commerce, it experienced the chatter of languages from all over the world, a melting pot of increasing diversity, In fact, the polities that inhabited the city left their own marks. In the middle of the 10th century, we have literary as well as archeological evidence of a large and thriving Jewish community in the area now known as Josefov to the north of the Great Market. These fortified communities were established both for the safety of the Jewish traders and residents who were suspicious of the heathens in their midst.
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The Jewish settlement would be relatively distant from the actual city centre, at that time in the 10th century, an informal settlement directly under the fortified protection of Prague Castle in what would later be redeveloped into the Lesser Town. The Judenstadt, or Jewish district then stood most to gain when the primary trade nexus moved directly south of them to Old Town. The ratification of Old Town’s charter in the mid-13th century further intensified the city’s development. Already completely urbanized, structures in the city had to fight for the basic utilities of that time: sunlight and ventilation. Built in stone, buildings transformed completely in functionality and access, whereas Romanesque houses had front yards and space for ground floor warehouses and workshops. New Gothic-style homes boasted new space-saving technologies: covered arcades, which allowed them to build further into the street which would maximize upper floor space, while allowing the public to shelter during rain and snow, consequently the oldest arcades in the country are found right on Old Town Square. German traders then moved their settlement within the Old Town Walls to establish a chapter of the Order of Teutonic Knights at the church of St. Benedict, now the location of the Kotva shopping centre. The Dominican Order strengthened themselves by moving close to Judith Bridge, which was slightly North of the current Charles Bridge. The old Romanesque Rotundas, which were privately funded began to be interconnected to networks of parish churches. Possibly most interesting however, is what happened to all the cemeteries. In Prague, as in most European cities, cemeteries came as a package with Churches. Cities were population sinks until the 19th century, so more people died there than were born.
