Paul Varian, retired CNN writer, editor and senior executive producer, accompanied George Novak, honorary consul general of the Czech Republic and Global Atlanta Publisher Phil Bolton on a recent reporting trip to Prague, Czech Republic. This is his story.
It’s known as the “City of A Hundred Spires” — ancient church steeples, fortified stone towers, majestic gothic, baroque and romanesque architecture. But you can be dazzled while strolling around Prague without ever lifting your eyes — by its seemingly endless array of artsy mosaic sidewalk cobbled with immaculately clean blocks of white, black, gray or red granite.
Its centerpiece is tourist-packed Wenceslas Square, a monument to the country’s patron saint and rallying point a quarter-century ago for dissidents led by poet-playwright Vaclav Havel in the “Velvet Revolution” that ended four decades of communist rule without a shot being fired and vaulted Mr. Havel into the presidency of the newly independent nation.
During the Advent season, which has a deep religious and popular tradition in the Czech Republic, the Wenceslas and nearby Old Town squares were decked out for the holidays — filled with caroling children, street performers dressed as St. Nicholas, the good angel, and a coal-toting devil, along with scores of Christmas shoppers.
Prague, once seat of the Holy Roman Empire, is a panorama of cathedrals dating back centuries, including one — the huge and ornate St. Vitus Basilica — that took 600 years to complete.
Catholic monks at Strahov Monastery stacked theology and philosophy books in a library with a high, beautifully muraled ceiling, brewing beer to support their work.
Temples abound In the old Jewish Quarter where walls inside Pinkas Synagogue are inscribed with the names of the nation’s 77,297 Holocaust victims.
Still Czechs, jaded by a history of religious conflict and foreign domination — most recently the Nazi and Soviet occupations — tend to be cynical and have little trust in institutions, church or state.
The current president, Milos Zeman, who served as prime minister under the now-deceased Mr. Havel, claimed in an interview that he leads “the most agnostic nation in Europe.”
Mr. Zeman has been notably accessible since taking office as the first directly elected Czech president in March 2013, but is very unpopular, according to recent polls, the comments of other leading figures and ordinary citizens we questioned and public protests against his regime.
A veteran himself of the “Velvet Revolution,” he was targeted by egg throwers at a November rally celebrating the 25th anniversary of that galvanizing event.
At age 70 a lumbering presence, enjoying a second act in politics after transforming the left wing Social Democrats into a major political party in the 1990s, Mr. Zeman appeared undaunted, walking slowly with a cane into an informal conference room in stately Prague Palace, home of princes and kings until the fall of monarchies after World War I.
“I think people are happier than they were during the time of communism,” he said. “And when there are demonstrations, they are spontaneous, not organized.”
During a nearly hourlong interview, Zeman complained about government corruption and incompetence, said too many of his ministers are inexperienced and he finds some of his day-to-day duties “boring.”
“My main mission,” he said, “is to support the exports and encourage direct investments” from other countries, most notably the United States and Western Europe. But Mr. Zeman’s efforts to enlist Russia and China as major trading partners has angered critics made uneasy by the Russian military intervention in Ukraine.
“I do not deny Russian aggression in western Ukraine and Crimea,” he said. But he added, “The greatest danger in the present world is the Islamic State.”
A pronounced Czech cultural consciousness seems all pervasive in Prague with its art museums, symphony hall, opera house, theater that once feted Mozart and a laid-back jazz club favored by Mr. Havel where Bill Clinton, during a presidential visit, joined in a saxaphone jam session.
Just off Wenceslas Square, visitors are struck by an odd artistic salute to its 10th Century Bohemian namesake — the imposing sculpture of a dead horse suspended upside down from the ceiling of the Lucerna shopping arcade with Wenceslas in full armor mounted on its belly.
It’s the work of contemporary artist David Cerny, who also created the oversized “crawling babies” that appear to be climbing the Zukov Television Tower, Prague’s tallest building that affords a breathtaking view of the city’s skyline.
There’s an entire museum dedicated to Czech painter and decorative artist Alfons Mucha, best known for posters he drew for the famed French actress Sarah Bernhardt but whose masterwork is “The Slavic Epic” — 20 huge paintings depicting the history of the Czech and Slavic people.
Viewed as a champion of Slavic nationalism, he was arrested by the Gestapo shortly after the 1939 Nazi invasion, stricken with pneumonia during his interrogation and died months later — after his release — at age 78.
Prague survived the ravages of World War II much more intact than other European capitals. Air raids caused minimal damage. The city’s most visual symbols were spared, chief among them the medieval Charles Bridge lined with 31 statues, bookended by massive stone towers on either side of the Vitava River and jammed with photo-taking pedestrians.
But the war’s memories linger. Jiri Snajdar, a civil engineer and university instructor, told us how, at age 3, he was standing near his father when he was killed by Soviet sniper fire outside Brno, second largest Czech city, on April 25, 1945, the day before the area was liberated from the Nazis, its streets littered with the bodies of soldiers from both armies.
The war’s legacy is familiar to Andrew Schapiro, youthful new U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic whose Jewish mother lived in Prague four blocks from the U.S. embassy where he now works until she was spirited from her homeland as a young girl to escape the Nazis.
Her grandmother and an uncle who stayed behind died in the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps.
Mr. Snajdar was among a quarter-million mostly well-educated, successful people, who fled the country after the Soviets and their Warsaw Pact allies invaded in 1968 to stamp out the “Prague Spring” reform movement — “socialism with a human face,” some called it — sanctioned by the Czech communist regime that took power a few years after the Nazis left. Its borders were later sealed and it became a crime to leave the country.
Tour guide Eva Vondrusova harbors her own childhood memories of the upheaval. “I was small but I remember waking up in the morning and seeing tanks outside,” she said. Her parents, both teachers, lost their jobs after her father renounced the occupation and resigned from the communist party, A longtime university professor, he suddenly could find work only as an unskilled laborer.
Michael Chour, general manager of Prague’s art deco Alcron Hotel where we stayed, told of a grandfather imprisoned for 16 years “for coming into conflict with the communist regime” and a father who “was not allowed to study,” forced to make a living as an electrician.
“The biggest damage the communists brought to this country was the damage to the morale,” he said.
Mr. Chour, ambitious though discouraged at every turn by parents still demoralized from their years under the communist clampdown, started his adult life as a construction worker, at age 22 moved to Germany where he could “make as much in one month as I earned in the Czech Republic in a year” and then worked his way through business school as a waiter.
That was his introduction to the hotel business and today, he says, “I love what I do” and believes there is opportunity for others who are “dedicated” to getting ahead.
Mr. Snajdar returned to his country after the fall of communism following years in Germany and Britain, lured back by privatization of the construction industry.
Jiri Rusnok, a former prime minister who is now a board member of the Czech National Bank, said Czechs found it “easier to go to an open economy” than others in the former Soviet bloc because of their pre-1948 history as a “market-driven country.”
“Some genes there still in the blood,” he said. “Everybody had to start from scratch, but the enthusiasm was enormous …to change quickly.”
Today the Czech Republic is considered one of the most stable and prosperous countries in central and Eastern Europe with a populace that has been historically well-educated, a skilled work force, well-developed infrastructure and strategic location in the very “center of Europe,” as Mr. Rusnok and many others put it.
“We are Increasing our competitiveness,” Mr. Rusnok said, noting that the Czech car company Skoda was set to break the million-vehicle sales mark for the first time. “We are increasing our share of the world trade. We are very much an export-oriented economy.”
Jan Burian, Russian-born director of the historic National Theater, foremost symbol of Czech patriotism, is more concerned about the state of Czech values in an evolving society he fears is being shaped by business interests and consumerism.
“Even in small towns, everybody has two cars — you can go shopping all day and all night,” he said in an office within eyeshot of Mr. Havel’s onetime home. But, he said, “People are disappointed,” just as Mr. Havel was by the time he stepped down as president.
The communist overthrow spawned a democratic but largely materialistic society that neglected to ask, “How important is it for us to create our own moral and cultural values,” Mr. Burian said. To the new generation that includes his own daughter, born in December 1989, “it’s history, not personal experience.”
Mr. Zeman said he too is concerned that Czechs have become “too hedonistic,” with a “propensity to consume rather than invest.”
“It is good to consume the apples,” he said, “but it is better to plant an apple tree.”
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