Prague Legends & Mysteries: Alchemists to Ghosts

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1. 1. Kampa

   Kampa, an island in all but feeling — cut off from Malá Strana by the Čertovka, the Devil's Stream. 🌿 The channel once drove a row of mills, and one of the waterwheels still turns beside the bridge. The park at the southern end is one of the few places by the river where the crowd thins out. The pace changes the moment you come down the steps from Charles Bridge.

2. 2. The Infant Jesus of Prague (Pražské Jezulátko)

   The Church of Our Lady Victorious, and the Infant Jesus of Prague. 🙏 The small wax-coated statue arrived from Spain in 1628 and is venerated far beyond the city — copies of it are prayed to across Latin America and the Philippines. It has a wardrobe of around a hundred embroidered robes, changed through the liturgical year, some sent as gifts from other countries. The adjoining museum displays them.

3. 3. Lennon Wall (Lennonova zeď)

   The Lennon Wall. 🕊️ After Lennon was shot in 1980, students began painting his face and lyrics here; under the communist government it was repainted over and over, and repainting it was itself the protest. Nothing on it now is old — it is covered and recovered constantly, and the current layer will not last the month. That impermanence is more or less the point.

4. 4. Golden Lane (Zlatá ulička)

   Golden Lane, a row of tiny houses built into the castle's outer wall in the sixteenth century for the castle guards. 🏘️ The alchemists of the legend never worked here — that story attached itself later, along with the name. Franz Kafka did write here for a while, in the winter of 1916, in the small blue house at number 22. The lane is inside the ticketed castle circuit and is best seen early or late.

5. 5. Speculum Alchemiӕ

   Speculum Alchemiӕ

6. 6. Drive House

   A stop chiefly for the architecture of the street it stands on. 🚗 The blocks in this part of the city carry a century of different intentions — Art Nouveau, functionalist, socialist-era — often side by side on the same frontage. Worth looking up at the upper floors, where the detail survives that the shopfronts below have lost.

7. 7. Dancing House (Tančící dům)

   The Dancing House, finished in 1996 by Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry. 💃 It stands on a plot left empty since an American bomb hit it in 1945. The nickname Ginger and Fred, after Rogers and Astaire, was applied to the two towers early on and stuck, though the architects were never fond of it. There is a bar on the top floor with a view along the river.

8. 8. Vyšehrad Cemetery (Vyšehradský hřbitov)

   Vyšehrad cemetery, where the Czech national revival buried its own. 🪦 Dvořák, Smetana, Mucha, Čapek — the Slavín tomb at the far end holds several dozen more. It sits beside the twin-spired basilica on the rock above the river, and the whole fortress site is far quieter than the castle across town. Entry is free; the walls around the graves are worth as much attention as the graves.

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