20 Sep 2021, Monday
20 Sep 2021, Monday
Prioritized Daily Tasks
Debbie and I got a good night's sleep, 10 hours. Frank Powell, my neighbor in Tallapoosa, called about 11 PM to tell me the loggers have started cutting the timber on the farm.
7 AM - We had a nice buffet breakfast with many of the first-class extras
8:30 AM - Walking tour of Prague, 4 hours
Day 2, 8:30 - 12:30, Tour Prague.
Four medieval towns, Old Town, New Town, Lesser Town, and Hilltop Hradčany. It is dominated by the vast Prague Castle complex. "In 1784 under Joseph II, the four independent Prague municipalities – Staré Město, Nové Město, Malá Strana and Hradčany – merged into one single entity and became the Royal City of Prague.
Shoah, the mass murder of Jewish people under the German Nazi regime during the period 1941–5; the Ηolocaust.
Debbie wrote today, "The city of Prague is divided into four parts-Old Town, New Town, Lesser Town and Castle Quarter. Old Town has boomed since the 100 century and then the Lesser Town where the workers lived-hatters, brick makers, leather workers, seamstresses, black smiths, etc.-the smelliest part of Prague. The Castle Quarter has the Prague Castle, President's residence and the St. Vitus Cathedral.
Today we visited the Old Town, drove through Lesser Town and visited the Castle Quarter.
Old Town was surrounded by a large wall and had huge gates to enter. The Old Town was surrounded by water-the River on the south and the wall with a moat on the east, north and west. It now has a road where the moat was. We entered the Powder gate (where the city's gunpowder was kept) and worked our way to the Old Town Square. The town has every architecture era: Gothic towers and steeples, Baroque tones, and Rococo palaces. The squares centerpiece is the memorial to Jan Has, the great Czech philosopher whose criticism of the Catholic Church sparked religious conflicts long before Martin Luther's time. On July 6, 1415, he was tied to a stake and burned to death by the Catholic Council.
The Tyn Church, built in 1360, is across the square with the Old Town Hall on the other side. The Astronomical Clock made in early 1400s is on the clock tower of the Old Town Hall. The clock has revolving discs, celestial symbols, and swiping hands to keep several versions of time. There are two figures on the right and two figures on the left-The figure for vanity, a Jewish moneylender holding a bag of coins is green and on the right a Turk with a mandolin symbolizes hedonism, and a skeleton with a bell. All these worldly goals are vain in the face of Death, whose hourglass reminds us that our time is unavoidably running out. The clock strikes the top of the hour and puts on a little show. First Death tips his hourglass and pulls the cord, ringing the bell, while the moneylender jingles his purse. Then the windows above open and the 12 apostles shuffle past, acknowledging the gang of onlookers. Finally, the rooster at the very top crows and the hour is rung. It is very fun to watch this display.
We learned today that in the basement of the Old Town Hall there are corridors under the building and the square where a hospital was set up during WWII to help with the wounded.
We saw a very unique building where the sides were plastered with two different colors of mortar. The top was scratched off to make motifs. It was a beautiful black and beige building with different pictures on all the sides. We made our way to the South Gate and met the Vltava river. The old bridge called the Charles Bridge was commissioned in 1342 and connects the Old Town with the Lesser Town at the base of the Castle Quarter. It offers one of the most pleasant entertaining strolls in Europe. Musicians, artisans, and a constant parade of people make it a festival everyday. The 30 statues that line the walkway across the bridge are of Saints that inspired the townsfolk each day as they crossed what was still the old bridge in town for 400 years.
We then went through the Lesser Town to the top of the hill where the Castle Quarter looks over the city of Prague. The Castle is surrounded by Royal Gardens that flow to the Lesser Town. It used to have a moat around it and then it was filled with bear and deer for hunting. In the middle of the Castle square is the St. Vitus Cathedral, is the top church of the Czech people. While it looks old, the front half is then same age as the Empire State Building, but built to match the original Gothic back half. It has 24 chapels, two tombed Saints, and a beautiful stained glass windows that tell gospel stories. The most famous is a stain glassed window made by Alfons Much, which tells the entire history of Christianity in the Czech lands--from the first missionaries to modern times-with swirling figures, vibrant colors, and powerful symbolism.
In the afternoon we visited the Jewish Quarters. The Jewish people from the Holy Land (Israel and Palestine) were dispersed by the Romans nearly 2,000 years ago. Over the centuries, their culture survived in enclaves through the world. Jews first came to Prague in the 10th center. The least habitable, marshy area closest to the bend in the Vltava River was allotted to the Jewish community. The Jewish Quarter's main intersection was the meeting point of two medieval trade routes. During the crusades in the 12th century the pope declared that Jews and Christians should not live together. Jews had to wear yellow badges, and their quarter was walled in and became a ghetto of wooden houses and narrow lanes. In the 16th and 17th centuries, Prague had one of the biggest ghettos in Europe, with 11,000 inhabitants. Within its six gates, Prague's Jewish Quarter was a gaggle of 200 wooden buildings.
Faced with institutionalized bigotry and harassment, Jews relied mainly on profits from moneylending and community solidarity to survive. While their money bought them protection, it was often a curse. Throughout Europe, when times got tough and Christian debts to the Jewish community mounted, entire Jewish communities were evicted or killed. The worst was when in 1096 and 1389 around 3,000 Jews were killed. When WWII hit, of the 55,000 Jews living in Prague in 1939, just 10,000 survived the Holocaust to see liberation in 1945. And in the communist era survival was slow. Today there are only 3,000 registered Jews in the Czech Republic, and of these, only 1,700 are in Prague.
We started our tour at the Maisel Synagogue, a private place of worship for the Maisel family during the 16th century. This was the golden age for the Prague Jews, when the Hapsburg rulers lifted the many bans and persecutions against them. This family synagogue is now a memorial to the victims of the Nazis. On the walls of this synagogue are the hand written names of 77,297 Czech Jews sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz and other camps. Czech Jews were especially hard hit by the Holocaust. More than 155,000 of them passed through the nearby Terezin camp alone. Most died with no grave marker, but they are remembered here. Family names are in red, followed in black by the individual's first name, birthday, and date of death or date of deportation. Members of the same family ae set off from others sharing the same surname by a dot. Among the names are the grandparents of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright-Prague born. Upstairs was a children's art gallery of the children's drawings while at Terezin. Of the 8,000 children transported from Terezin, only 240 came back.
We then went to the Pinkas Synagogue, a site of Jewish worship since the 16th century. Inside the interactive exhibit retraces a thousand years of Jewish history in Bohemia and Moravia. We then walked through Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery and meandered along a path through 12,000 evocative tombstones. They're old, eroded, inscribed in Hebrew, and leaning this way and that. A few of the dead have larger ark-shaped tombs. Most have a simple epitaph with the name, date, and a few of the deceased's virtue. From 1439 to 1787, this was the only burial ground allowed for the Jews of Prague. Over time, the graves had to e piled on top of each other--seven or eight deep--so there are actually closer to 85,000 dead here. Graves were never relocated because of the Jewish belief that, once buried, a body should not be moved. Layer by layer, the small cemetery grew into a small plateau. And as things settled over time, the tombstones became crooked. People leave pebbles on top of the graves or little pieces of paper that contain prayers and wishes. This is to let the dead know that they are not forgotten.
Our last stop, was the Klausen Synagogue, a 17th century Baroque-style synagogue, which had displays on Jewish religious practices. On display was the Torah-1411- (the first five books of the the Christian Old Testament) and the solid silver pointers used when reading it-necessary since the Torah is not to be touched. We saw a couple of shofar horns, blown ritually during Jewish high holy days. There was an Omer Calendar to keep track of the holidays, objects of the Jewish community, and scrolls ornamented in silver.
Another synagogue was the Old-New Synagogue-for more that 700 years, it had been the most important synagogue and the central building in Josefov. Built in 1270, it's the oldest synagogue in Eastern Europe and the oldest still-working synagogue in all of Europe. We were not allowed inside, but took a picture of the uniqued roof line and the Jewish clock in the background."
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