Prague, While It Still Breathes
Prague is often grey in old photographs. Some of that grey belongs to the black-and-white film. The rest I remember without needing a photograph. Stained walls, smoke above the rooftops, passages beneath scaffolding that seemed, on some buildings, to have become a permanent architectural feature. A city with magnificent bones and a weary face. People queued for books and tangerines, and both said something about the times we lived in. You queued for something to read and for a taste of a world far beyond your own.
I was born here. My family has been connected to Prague for generations, so its past was never something I encountered only in history books. It was there in street names, in the buildings we walked past, in family stories and in the unthinking way we claimed certain places as our own. You know some corners of a city long before you begin to wonder why they mean something to you. Only later do you realise how many lives are bound up in that quiet sense of belonging.
Prague under communism had learned to make do with little and expect even less. Repairs were postponed, dust settled in shop windows, and people grew used to stepping around yet another obstacle. Behind the closed doors of their flats, they managed to create quite different worlds. They looked after their homes, kept them clean, gathered with friends, read and listened to music. But the hallway, the space outside the building and the street beyond belonged to the domain of a distant, impersonal authority. The sense that public space belonged to us too, and that we had a say in what happened to it, had been worn away. Then the city began to breathe again.
After November 1989, more changed than the signs on government buildings. There was anticipation in the streets. Shops, cafés and clubs opened, along with possibilities we had previously only heard about from elsewhere. New colours, new smells, new languages began to arrive. Architectural details gradually emerged from beneath the grime we had walked past for years. There was less smoke and more reason to look around. It was as though Prague were seeing its own face again after a long absence.
Freedom was tangible then. An open door. The chance to leave and come back. To start something of your own. To say what you thought out loud. To try doing things differently, however clumsily, and make mistakes along the way. For us, the West also held out the hope of a certain dignity in everyday life: that a well-maintained building need not be an exception, decent service a surprise, or caring about your own street a pointless exercise.
The 1990s had a brutal side too. Ruthlessness, fraud, easy money and the feeling that if you did not grab your share now, there would be nothing left. And there was violence. The photographs of demonstrations still hold the batons, paving stones, blood and burning cars. Those images belong to the same city as the first freshly restored buildings and newly opened cafés. Looking through the archive now, I see anger and uncertainty alongside hope. The future was open, and competing visions of who it would belong to sometimes collided violently in the streets.