A Hundred Spires
The Holiday Season in Prague, the City of a Hundred Spires
by Victor Metron & Josiah Roe
The glow of the street lamps are reflected in the polished cobblestones, and broken only by the footsteps of tourists and locals as they meander through narrow alleyways and across the Old Town Square, the “Staromák” .
The Church of St. Nicholas is silhouetted against the sky and its snow-fringed spires seem to call across to the Old Town Hall. Its enormous clock, the “Prague Orloj”, dutifully measures the seconds, minutes, and hours in an almost-joke to the City. The sights and sounds could just as easily be 1220 as 2020.
We walk past Christmas trees made of a hundred thousand lights and step into a cafe to procure two double espressos, and then walk across the Charles Bridge with its 600 year old pillars and statues and street lamps topped with snow.
Music echoes across the Vlatava River as raucous tour boats pass below. High on a hill distant a thousand year old castle is lit up in celebration, and one by one songs and sounds rise intertwined above red-roofed buildings.
We pass and are passed by a thousand smiles as we step into Wenceslas Square where 30 years ago a half million then-Czechoslovakians stood united in peaces and committed to freedom to hear a retired forest worker say:
“If once there was light, why should there be darkness again? We have lived in darkness for too long. Let us act to bring the light back again.”
The feeling of timeless immediacy.
