Bohemian Travels

We absolutely loved our time in the former Austro-Hungarian empire but were excited to be back in Germany at the start of this week. That however didn't stop us from wanting to spend a bit of time in Czechia as we made our way north.

The drive from Nuremberg to Prague was a formidable one at 4 hours and we didn't particularly fancy doing it in an evening and missing everything along the way. Instead on Thursday we opted to do the drive with a few stops to enjoy some of the Czech countryside. Our first stop was at this abandoned Church since, if you couldn't tell, we love a good ruined building with no museum staff around.

The main stop of the day however was at Pilsen. This city is the home of the famous Skoda works, the pilsner beers, and plenty of Austro-Hungarian architecture. Being the main city on the trading routes between Bavaria and Prague, Pilsen grew as a city to be the third largest city in Czechia.

Further into the city we came across yet another easter market but this time equipped with a Church and a band.

We had a nice, albeit very sweaty and humid, wander around the city before moving on and parking up in the suburbs of Prague to visit the next day.

Arriving in Prague we were met with the majestic site of the Charles bridge. This impressive baroque construction was the main, and only, bridge across the river until the 19th century. Since the castle lies on the western bank and the city on the eastern bank the bridge was the site of numerous battles. This included during the Hussitie wars, a 15th century religious conflict, the 30 years war, started and ended in Bohemia, and the 1848 revolutions.

Instead of the usual city museum we rolled the dice on an experimental museum in Prague. This was somewhat light on historical content but had lots of very cool exhibits. The above photo shows the golem of Prague. Due to some terrible antisemitic persecution, a rabbi in Prague supposedly came up with a solution. He used clay to create a huge Golem to protect the Jews of Prague. The legend goes that this Golem never left the city and lies in rest in one of the attics in the city.

In a stop in a board game shop, a must for us at this point although our collection is rapidly outgrowing Moira, we came across this fella.

Rained off the streets we decided to take advantage of our city travel pass and use the metro system. Since Prague was occupied, effectively, by the soviets for 40 years much of its infrastructure was built by them. The Metro here was designed with multiple purposes as a nuclear shelter for the city and to be flood proof. A flood in 2002 proved the ineffectiveness of the soviet engineers and the whole metro system was flooded for weeks.

Prague seems very proud, if its tourist adverts are anything to go by, of its famous clock. Still largely incomprehensible to me the broad principle seemed to be separating the day into 12 hours of daylight, the length of which hours varied based on the length of sunlight in the day.

Further wandering, and getting soggy, led to us stumbling upon the powder tower, one of Prague's famous 100 spires.

Nearly done for the day but very shattered we decided to pop into one final museum: the museum of communism. This was an impressive exhibition of the 42 years of Communist rule in Czechoslovakia full of the tales of individuals. One of the stories that most intrigued me was the massive statue of Stalin above the city. Taking 8 years to build this was finished in 1955. This was however 2 years after Stalin died and so the process of pulling the statue down began shortly after its completion. The controlled explosions to demolish the statue lasted days and the booms could be heard across the city.

With the easter weekend fast approaching we hightailed it out of Czechia to spend the Saturday in Dresden before many of the shops and museums would be closed for 2 days.