Where'd you like to go?
{"name":"__sid_suggestions-hotels","value":"w-us-3.16.78.138-fac378ac3b3d3886829021b3309d4fd1-17396415125302025-02-15 18:02:14suggestions-hotels"}
Enter
My Profile
Edit your profile
Close session
Write an opinion
Publish

Malá Strana

{"name":"__sid_suggestions-hotels","value":"w-us-3.16.78.138-fac378ac3b3d3886829021b3309d4fd1-17396415125302025-02-15 18:02:14suggestions-hotels"}

28 reviews of Malá Strana

One of the most beautiful cities in the world

Prague...one of the most beautiful cities in the world. If you do visit, you will enjoy centuries-long history, beautiful historic buildings, bridges over the river Vltava and numerous towers. Visit the Royal Castle, watch the parade of the Royal Guard, and see the panorama of Prague from the lookout near the royal vineyards.

You absolutely must visit the numerous beer halls in Prague and test the many types of quality beer; the most popular beer gardens are a small family breweries with limited-edition un-filtered beer.

Visit the restaurants and find a very delicious variety of Czech specialties...my recommendation is veal steak in blueberry sauce.

If you have the ability to visit Prague, do so and enjoy the beauty of true capital of Europe.Eternal city...
Read more
+91

Debating Kafka in Prague

“It was late evening when K. arrived. The village lay under deep snow. There was no sign of the Castle hill, fog and darkness surrounded it, not even the faintest gleam of light suggested the large Castle. K. stood a long time on the wooden bridge that leads from the main road to the village, gazing upward into the seeming emptiness.”

So begins The Castle, Kafka’s masterpiece about K’s tragic and absurd struggle with a formless, shadowy authority to access the even more mysterious castle, which dominates both literally and metaphorically the village below. Kafka’s break-neck pace, his fluid and punctuation-less paragraphs, his bumbling yet deeply disturbing characters all create an atmosphere of dread and of coming calamity. K challenges, he fights; K. retreats, he loses. Every time K senses he has won or has found a path through the town’s thorny thick, the pendulum swings back. Hope is lost. The castle is impenetrable; its representatives, inscrutable. He suffers and he hurts, his resolve defeated but K. must struggle on. In the end, as in most of Kafka’s works, the protagonist loses; authority, not ever specifically defined, wins.


Many readers of Kafka have credited him with predicting the arrival of 20th century totalitarianism. Key elements of the totalitarian world - the absurd, random, and circular logic of bureaucratization, the ubiquitous surveillance systems and the unaccountable, formless and faceless, invisible and infallible, executioner - all shine in Kaka’s stories. As K dies at the end of The Trial, the narrator wonders, “Where was the judge whom he had never seen? Where was the high court, to which he had never penetrated?” He never locates or sees Power’s centre. Of course, other Kafka scholars caution again such a one-dimensional reading of Kafka; they, rather, suggest reading him as one would parables – open to many interpretations.

As I leave Stare Mesto, Prague’s glittering old town, and cross the famed Charles Bridge, I see Prazksy Hrad, Prague’s Castle, looming ominously above the city and Vltava River. I can’t help but wonder whether this was the castle Kafka thought of when he envisioned the world of K and the Castle’s village. The Hrad plays the part: it is the biggest castle complex in the world. Likely founded at the end of the ninth century, the site is a mishmash of palaces and ecclesiastical buildings adopting a variety of architectural styles – Gothic, Roman, Baroque – from different time periods. Undoubtedly, St. Vitus Cathedral reigns as the most important building in the complex. A fabulously grandiose structure, the French Gothic cathedral hearkens back to the fourteenth century and was not finished until 1929, seven years after Kafka’s death. Inside, streams of refracted light slice through stained-glass windows and drown the nave in color. More than its architectural beauty, the Cathedral houses the fabled Crown Jewels of Bohemia. They lie behind an iron safe containing seven key-holes. All prominent members of Czech civic/political/religious society hold a key: the Prime Minister, the Archbishop, the Mayor of Prague, etc. They must all open it together.

Although things must have been done differently in Kafka’s day, it is not difficult to surmise how the exercise of power through the Hrad’s deep symbolism and associated rituals must have both fascinated and disturbed Kafka. Power operates through not only brute force but also revered symbols and the banality of everyday routine. And the inhabitants of Prague would come to know this intimately in the years following Kafka’s death.

On the other side of the river, in the old town, sits Prague’s town square. Unapologetically flamboyant, the square showcases the twin Gothic steeples of Tyn Church, the baroque St. Nicolas Church and the clock tower of the Old Town Hall. At the centre stands a monument to Jan Hus, the great church reformer whose criticisms of the granting of indulgences preceded the Reformation’s own critiques. He was promptly burned alive in the square in 1415.

Standing where the fire ate Hus’s flesh, I wonder if the square’s homage to both barbarism and beauty caught the eye of Hitler when he delivered his stirring speech here after he invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15th 1939. Hitler famously found Prague breathtakingly beautiful and refused to bomb it; he hoped the city would serve as the hub of Nazi culture following the inevitable Aryan victory. The Nazis would occupy Prague until the Prague uprising on May 5th 1945. The euphoria would be short-lived.

From 1945 until the election of Vaclav Havel in 1992 and the dissolution of Czechoslovakia in 1993, Prague was under Soviet control. During those years, Prague appeared Kafkaesque: secret trials, unknown crimes, mind-numbing bureaucratization, and the arbitrary and random abuses of power all came to define life in Czechoslovakia. With power, however, there is resistance. Vaclav Havel emerged as a K-like dissident: he challenged the Communist Party through writing essays, plays and even forming a rock band, Charter 77. He was often rebuffed, only to try again. Unlike K, however, Vaclav and his ilk were eventually victorious with the 1992 Velvet (read: Peaceful) Revolution which finally ended Communist rule. It would appear that Czech history has proven Kafka wrong: A handful of rowdy visionaries ve did not lose hope even after many disheartening defeats managed to decapitate Communism. Havel became a moral figure ve commanded great authority.

But as I wander the back, twisting streets of Prague’s old town, I think that a new, shapeless power has replaced Communism’s hammer and sickle: the power of no alternative. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, neo-liberalism ascended. No one debated what future systems might emerge, what political projects were possible. The answer had been given: Capitalism. Havel became a depoliticized, moral symbol of the triumph over communism, of the sanctity of human rights and of the virtues of Western liberalism. The bravado, ethics, and ideals were gone. The narrative of world transformation was cynically co-opted by those ve desire no metamorphosis. Therein lies power’s punch: to take a threat and produce a parrot.

And as we jump from one capitalistic catastrophe to the next and as the earth heats and poverty climbs unabated, I cannot help but imagine K. knocking on the Hrad’s mammoth doors and whispering ‘Is anyone there?’
Read more
+7
Have you been here?
Add your opinion and photos and help other travelers discover
{"name":"__sid_suggestions-hotels","value":"w-us-3.16.78.138-fac378ac3b3d3886829021b3309d4fd1-17396415125302025-02-15 18:02:14suggestions-hotels"}

Information about Malá Strana