I loved Prague before I ever got there and maybe this is to blame on the narratives of the 1968 crushing of its Spring, on the bit of Kafka, Kundera and Ivan Klima I read, or the true Bud beer, or the smoothness of the velvet separation of Czechs and Slovaks - perhaps even on the personality of Havel or the class demonstrated by the football team that crushed us Greeks in 1980's Euro when even the Germans couldn't.
The main damage was done by the visuals, though. Not sure what came first but there were two bits. In ascending order of influence: a magazine feature (Time, I think, but not sure anymore) and a music video. With the latter I wasn't sure at first. After all it was late '88 or early '89. This part of the world was kind of closed, wasn't it? Off-limits. Forbidden, I thought.
Enter my dad with his early '80s adversity to communism - so strong at times that when I once mentioned the term East Bloc to him, he curtly advised me not to talk so much about it. Not that I really ever did - people who inspired me in my teens were often socialist-leaning but rarely of the pro-Moscow variety. I was convinced (and remain to this day) that no sane person - other than the power-holders - would really ever like to live in these societies.
What we called East Europe - as if my country were more western geographically than Czechoslovakia - was a terra incognita hidden behind the veil of my indifference and ignorance. I knew of a few iconic monuments and landscapes but nothing of the greying former Habsburg or Czarist cities, the trams and cobblestone streets never too far from a river.
The opening scenes (or rather, each and every second) of the INXS clip revealed a footbridge with sculptures across a stretch of water that could only be described by the German word prachtvoll, in the same language used by the famous Jewish author of dark situations and by the people that fled the region a few years after being used in the prelude of World War II.
The sax and violins of Never Tear Us Apart helped strengthen my desire to visit the Czechoslovak and later Czech capital, but this only happened almost a decade after the song's release. My first walk in the former East Bloc, however, was not in sunlit Prague but in dark Brno, on my arrival prior to a business trip. I was dead tired following successive travels but needed to eat, so I took a walk along a street leading up to the only square with a promise of a restaurant. Old trams and even older buildings and barely another walker encountered in over a quarter of an hour: could it still be as bleak these days?
Living in such a town for over two years now -the former Austrohungarian and then Yugoslav Zagreb- I now know better how they look and especially feel. Their facades may need major investment to look as fresh as the otherwise similar ones in Graz or Salzburg, but everything else is pretty much similar. Never the same - although to buffs of exotic travel they may look as uniform as East Asian faces seem to us Europeans (when we are our narrower selves). Human geography and history - in particular, the cultural diversity we have learned to notice on this continent - can truly make the difference in our perception.
The second visit to Prague, on a working Friday and a bonus weekend in '98, remains the prettiest of my eastern experiences in the past twenty years. I walked down Petrin hill and up the cemetery, spent time at a bookstore in Josefov (leaving with an amazing Jan Lukas photo album of Greece as it looked before my birth) and at various cafes reading books, chatted (occasionally drinking beer) with people I will probably never see again. Last but not least, I visited the old residence hosting my country's embassy, to get a signed and stamped paper proving* forever that I wasn't among the voters who got a "Mr Nobody" elected to some office (I only need to remember where I've stored it).
While I'm still living just 8 hours' driving time away, I hope to share this urban beauty with people who couldn't (have) join(ed) me. Maybe we will get lucky this summer, in which case we'll be able to call today's desire "my one and only new year's resolution".
[This post's title is taken from the song's lyrics, written by the late Michael Hutchence]
*Back then, voting was compulsory; when not voting, it was useful to have official proof you were at a distance above 200 kilometers
The main damage was done by the visuals, though. Not sure what came first but there were two bits. In ascending order of influence: a magazine feature (Time, I think, but not sure anymore) and a music video. With the latter I wasn't sure at first. After all it was late '88 or early '89. This part of the world was kind of closed, wasn't it? Off-limits. Forbidden, I thought.
Enter my dad with his early '80s adversity to communism - so strong at times that when I once mentioned the term East Bloc to him, he curtly advised me not to talk so much about it. Not that I really ever did - people who inspired me in my teens were often socialist-leaning but rarely of the pro-Moscow variety. I was convinced (and remain to this day) that no sane person - other than the power-holders - would really ever like to live in these societies.
What we called East Europe - as if my country were more western geographically than Czechoslovakia - was a terra incognita hidden behind the veil of my indifference and ignorance. I knew of a few iconic monuments and landscapes but nothing of the greying former Habsburg or Czarist cities, the trams and cobblestone streets never too far from a river.
The opening scenes (or rather, each and every second) of the INXS clip revealed a footbridge with sculptures across a stretch of water that could only be described by the German word prachtvoll, in the same language used by the famous Jewish author of dark situations and by the people that fled the region a few years after being used in the prelude of World War II.
The sax and violins of Never Tear Us Apart helped strengthen my desire to visit the Czechoslovak and later Czech capital, but this only happened almost a decade after the song's release. My first walk in the former East Bloc, however, was not in sunlit Prague but in dark Brno, on my arrival prior to a business trip. I was dead tired following successive travels but needed to eat, so I took a walk along a street leading up to the only square with a promise of a restaurant. Old trams and even older buildings and barely another walker encountered in over a quarter of an hour: could it still be as bleak these days?
Living in such a town for over two years now -the former Austrohungarian and then Yugoslav Zagreb- I now know better how they look and especially feel. Their facades may need major investment to look as fresh as the otherwise similar ones in Graz or Salzburg, but everything else is pretty much similar. Never the same - although to buffs of exotic travel they may look as uniform as East Asian faces seem to us Europeans (when we are our narrower selves). Human geography and history - in particular, the cultural diversity we have learned to notice on this continent - can truly make the difference in our perception.
The second visit to Prague, on a working Friday and a bonus weekend in '98, remains the prettiest of my eastern experiences in the past twenty years. I walked down Petrin hill and up the cemetery, spent time at a bookstore in Josefov (leaving with an amazing Jan Lukas photo album of Greece as it looked before my birth) and at various cafes reading books, chatted (occasionally drinking beer) with people I will probably never see again. Last but not least, I visited the old residence hosting my country's embassy, to get a signed and stamped paper proving* forever that I wasn't among the voters who got a "Mr Nobody" elected to some office (I only need to remember where I've stored it).
While I'm still living just 8 hours' driving time away, I hope to share this urban beauty with people who couldn't (have) join(ed) me. Maybe we will get lucky this summer, in which case we'll be able to call today's desire "my one and only new year's resolution".
[This post's title is taken from the song's lyrics, written by the late Michael Hutchence]
*Back then, voting was compulsory; when not voting, it was useful to have official proof you were at a distance above 200 kilometers
