INTRODUCTION First things first: Prague is a very beautiful city. With some six hundred years of architecture virtually untouched by natural disaster or war, few other cities, anywhere in Europe, look as good. Straddling the winding River Vltava, with a steep wooded hill to one side, the city retains much of its medieval layout and the street facades remain smothered in a rich mantle of Baroque, Rococo and Art Nouveau, all of which successfully escaped the vanities and excesses of postwar redevelopment. Of course, while the Iron Curtain was still in place, Prague was seldom visited by westerners – since the 1990s, however, all that has changed. Prague is now one of the most popular city break destinations in Europe, and is enjoying the sort of economic boom not seen since the 1920s.
Prague’s emergence as one of Europe’s leading cities, capital of a country poised to join the EU, has come as a surprise to many people – but not the Czechs. After all, Prague was at the forefront of the European avant-garde for much of the last century, boasting a Cubist movement second only to Paris, and, between the wars, a modernist architectural flowering to rival Bauhaus. With a playwright and human rights activist as their president, the Czechs easily grabbed the headlines in the 1990s. Even today, the country’s athletes and models enjoy a very high profile, and its writers, artists and film directors continue to exert a profound influence on European culture, out of all proportion to their number.
Naturally, not everybody is happy with the changes. Like most central Europeans, Czechs love to moan, especially over a glass or two of beer. Prices have gone up dramatically over the past ten years, with ever-increasing rents pushing locals out of the centre, and ever more expensive restaurants making the old town a no-go area for the average Praguer. Some argue that over-zealous restoration has turned central Prague into a theme park, that the arrival of the multinationals has made Prague like every other European city, and that the smartening-up of the city centre has made the place just like Vienna (a city universally disliked by Czechs).
Certainly, the exhilarating popular unity of the 1989 Velvet Revolution, and the feeling of participating in history itself, have now gone for ever. Few Czechs refer to the events of 1989 as a "revolution". Disorientation at the speed of change, disillusionment with modern politics and the first real taste of Western vices in the capital have taken their toll. The lifestyle gulf between Party and non-Party members has been replaced by the Western malaise of rich and poor. There’s nothing new in this, but it does serve as a sobering footnote to the city’s glowing image in the West.
