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. 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.

Eventually most cemeteries had to become multilayered to keep up with demand, something still visible in the Old Jewish Cemetery. Urbanization however, put even more pressure on Old Town, and even these crammed cemeteries started to disappear. Some of the Sites were redeveloped into buildings, but some remained empty, being turned into city squares. Small Square is one such place, a medieval cemetery that was paved over at the end of the 13th century. The beautifully decorated well in the centre of this square is also at the centre of the cemetery, whose bodies remain 800 years later.

Prague, and especially Old Town, quickly became a Continental centre of culture as well. Agnes of Bohemia, granddaughter of Vaclav I. suffered when her betrothed decided to marry someone else. She decided to give up her privileged, if oppressed, life as a royal daughter, and contacted Clare of Assisi and her Order of Poor Ladies to construct a convent on the Northern banks of Old Town that would serve the city’s poor like their male counterparts the Friars, however, she used her previous position through her father, the King, to contact the best craftsmen in Europe to aid in the convent’s construction.

Many of these craftsmen came directly from the French royal court in Paris thanks to her correspondences with The French King and Pope. The resulting convent of the Clarisses, now the National Gallery, contains also the first traces of truly Gothic architecture in Central Europe, in addition to this the same craftsmen who constructed the famous SainteChapelle in Paris, built the main chapel, which has the same monumentality.

Some of these same craftsmen stayed in the city to construct other private and sacral structures, including the Old-New Synagogue. It was at this time Prague began to be called “Golden”.

The ensuing 14th and 15th centuries carried with them the marks that Old Town would export not only to the rest of the country, but to Europe as a whole. The German traders had long since began to inhabit the areas of the city that had previously been dominated by the local, Slavic population. Their wealth, accumulated through the importation of faroff luxuries, such as salt and spices, precious stones, and knowledge, allowed them the means to establish themselves in the city’s government. Old Town began to be increasingly German dominated, as the poorer Czech population simply couldn’t afford the fees necessary to run and maintain office. Compounding this was the principle of Ostsiedlung (lit. East settling) in which Polish, Czech and Hungarian Kings invited settlers from the overcrowded German polities in the Holy Roman Empire, to settle the sparsely populated mountainous border regions of Bohemia, and thereby make those areas economically productive.

This likewise led to an increase in local nobilities being established as German or Germanizing. Successive Kings were aware of this growing ethnic tension, and proceeded to attempt to alleviate the situation in Prague by first founding the Lesser Town to lure the growing urban German aristocracy closer to the surveillance of the King, and later the establishment of New Town, which became heavily populated by the indigenous Czech population of the city, increasing the power of the German citizens in Old Town. Attempts to unify Old and New Town failed in 1367 spectacularly, which forced the emperor to revoke his decision just a decade later, reestablishing the division.

Ethnic tension meant religious tension as well. Europe-wide peasant revolts in the early 1380s shook the King’s faith in his safety in the city, after experiencing the rising tensions, the king permanently evacuated to Prague Castle, abandoning his home in Old Town. This loss allowed more violence to erupt soon after.

In 1398, Prague’s most infamous pogrom against its Jewish population occurred. On Easter that year, a group of Jewish children were playing with a bag of sand, which hit a Christian priest. The priest whipped up a furor when he declared the act a “defilement of the Body of Christ“. What followed was the massacre of 3000 Jews and the expulsion and confiscation of property of all the remaining inhabitants of the Judenstadt. To this day the reason for such depraved acts is still debated, though it is commonly accepted to have stemmed from contemporary attacks on corruption in the Church. It is no surprise then, that this period also corresponds to the rise of the Hussites.

Photo by Chelsea London Phillips

The Hussite period mixed these religious tensions with political allegiance. Though much of the juicy details of the conflicts are outside the scope of Old Town itself, it is important to note that Jan Hus, the father of Protestantism, studied and taught Theology here in the Charles University and likewise preached on Bethlehem Square, named after its eponymous Chapel. The only original remnants of that chapel are some of its exterior walls, which were reused for that apartment building. As a result, we will never know what the deeply satirical frescoes that once lined its walls said, even though we have many accounts of travelers describing their experiences and sometimes shock in seeing them. For this period, it is however important to note that due to the numerous wars, Hussite loyalists took over positions of power in the city and established their own councils.

The 17th century dealt another striking blow, as Old Town was ravaged by a massive fire, destroying much of the Renaissance and Gothic city, as well as most historic documents from that time. It was this devastating fire, that allowed for the city to transform into the form we know today. With its old majestic palaces ruined, the reconstruction efforts at the turn of the 18th century lead to High Baroque architecture that gave the city the distinct core we know today. The subdivided plots of townhouses were bought up for cheap to build ostentatious palaces. Wealthy ecclesiastical orders commissioned expansive luxurious structures, namely the Jesuits who commissioned such buildings as the Klementinium, the Church of St. Nicholas on Old Town Square, St. Francis and St. Jacob.

Slowly recovering during the 18th century, the city was occupied once more by the French and Prussians during the War of Austrian Succession in 1744. Old Town saw its final blow to its sovereignty, under Maria Theresa’s son, Emperor Josef II, who, in 1784, finally achieved what previous Kings could not, the unification of all Prague’s cities (except the Judenstadt and Vyšehrad) into one city. From then on until its destruction in 1945, the entire city was headed in the Old Town Hall. On Old Town Square. Josef II, however also abolished ecclesiastic orders, which again freed land in the city for redevelopment, with numerous monastic gardens succumbing. Most importantly, he also abolished most forms of serfdom, allowing newly unshackled peoples to travel from the countryside to cities to make better lives for themselves.

In the 19th century, the increase in population from Czech peasants, started to change the city’s demography. The city council became majoritarily Czech and, by 1900, the German Population of the city dropped to just 15%. The Rise of Prague as the centre of Czech culture and then Nationalism reverberated in the desire for it to become a world-class metropolis for the Czechs. What we now call Národní Třída (National Avenue), was at the time of its reconstruction called Alejová (Alley, after the alley of trees that lined it). Larger palaces were reconstructed to face onto the street, like the Platýz Palace, which before its reconstruction had fronted onto Uhelný trh (Coal Market). The second largest change for Old town was the construction of embankments on the Vltava River. Old Town had always suffered from seasonal flooding, which led to schemes to raise the city, but it was never enough. Starting from the 1850s however, being inspired by the Victoria Embankment in London, Prague began destroying the baroque workshops, dye factories and tanneries on the riverfront to make pleasant embankments for promenading.

The final great change for Old Town was decidedly the destruction of the Jewish Quarter, the Judenstadt and its redevelopment. Prague was the only city in Europe aside from Rome that had not embarked on an extensive system of demolishing its historic inner-city core in order to rebuild it to better hygienic standards. As a result, much of the Northern section of Old Town, not only the Judenstadt, but also the remaining Gothic Quarter were slated to be torn down and rebuilt. Thankfully, the full plan was never achieved, thanks to the founding of monument protection societies.

The entire Judenstadt, save for 4 buildings and part of its historic cemetery were leveled and, in their place a few decades later, arose the fashionable and ornamented apartment palaces that now are emblematic of the Pařížská locale. Of the Jewish community that once lived there, those who were better off chose to move to the newly founded city of Vinohrady, until the community was decimated in the Second World War.

From this period onward, Old Town has continued to progressively lose inhabitants every year. Whether it was under the auspices of the First Republic, which encouraged the growth and the incorporation of rapidly urbanizing suburbs, or the Socialist Regime that intentionally moved citizens from the city centre to newly built, healthier and more comfortable estates in the city’s periphery, Old Town experienced the one constant of depopulation. This trend has only increased after the Velvet Revolution and the lack of a developed central business district due to Socialist planning, led the free market to choose one. What were for hundreds of years individual townhouses with workshops on their ground floors, are now unified into block-sized hotels.

I do not lament the loss of the composition of Old Town as it was. I do not fear that the district itself will cease to exist. It has shown resilience for over a thousand years, through disaster, through hardship and through prosperity.

I used to enjoy my walks through Old Town, hearing the soles of my shoes reverberate off those handsome buildings, listening for the miniscule changes in echo that give every trip through there a sense of uniqueness. Today, between the shouts of generic buskers, large tour groups chanting in unison, the fake klaxons of new cars masquerading as old, I cannot hear this echo anymore.

By David Lameš

Photo by Lada Nayevo