Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [16]
The Museum of Monastic Technology
THE DISTRICT OF HRADANY LIES IN THE shadow of the Prague Castle, across the river and to the northwest of city center. Perched on a hill that provides a dreamy view of the spires and domes of Prague’s cityscape, Hradany epitomizes Prague’s wonderful duplicity, in which dazzling charm exists within a hair’s breadth of eye-goggling eccentricity—for hidden within this quaint, quiet neighborhood of cobbled squares and sixteenth-century cottages are the Strahov Monastery cabinets of curiosity.
Strahov’s only official attraction is its library. The photo that lures tourists from the monastery’s nondescript courtyard depicts a bibliophile’s wet dream of room. The walls are lined with densely ornamented Rococo bookcases two stories high, which house a collection of over forty thousand books more than six centuries old. The ceiling is adorned in eighteenth-century fresco, and a red carpet along the wood inlay floor beckons in silent invitation. The one library feature that the photograph overlooks is the rope that stretches across the room’s entrance, rendering the books, the shelves, and even the red carpet off-limits. Strahov’s library rooms are arrayed like meticulously prepared corpses, their coffin lids opened to permit cautious viewing. Prague finds peculiar pleasure in teasing book lovers this way—the Clementinum also brags of a Baroque library but then doesn’t permit paying visitors past the red velvet ropes barring its threshold. It is sheer bibliophilic cruelty to refer to such sepulchers as libraries. Library implies interaction with the books it contains, even if one’s intercourse is limited to reading spines and inhaling the room’s intoxicating must.
The hallway leading to Strahov’s sequestered library is dimly lit and carpeted in ugly brown linoleum and discourages an extended stay. Its contents—a coat of chain mail and a coat of armor, a family tree of Francisco I, a wood-inlaid breakfast tray featuring Christ feeding lambs, two tinted pictures of an ancient and forgotten siege, and a diorama depicting the life cycle of the silkworm—might easily inhabit the drafty hallway of an Old World hotel that had been forced to pawn its nicer furnishings.
Dispersed among these haphazard objects are several antique display cabinets. Made of warm-colored wood and fronted by ornamental window-paned doors, they’re nicer than anything else in the hallway, but their charms are modest in comparison to the spectacular bookcases in the adjoining library. At first glance the cabinets’ contents are similarly uninspiring. Most are devoted to a collection of bird nests, shells, butterflies, and beetles. The shells are arranged in dusty rows that betray the uneven surfaces on which they were placed, gravity and time having worked in slow, steady tandem to make curves of straight lines. There are no signs, plaques, or explanatory literature, and the surly Czech matrons serving as security guards are equally unforthcoming. Officiousness is one pre-glasnost keepsake Prague is loath to disown—it is one of the few pleasures working-class Czechs can still afford. The matrons’ position has granted them exactly two advantages over the tourists they’ve been hired to watchdog, and so their energies are divided between the scrupulous examination of each entry ticket and by the frequent excursions in and out of the barred library rooms.
Though the history of Strahov’s cabinets of curiosity is muddy, the rare guidebook cites their establishment sometime during the eighteenth century. Perhaps the monastery’s collection was once a grander thing but today it has been reduced to eight cases. The two most visible cabinets lie on the path between the two library rooms. One contains insect specimens. The other contains pottery, a china plate, metal stirrups, two china figurines of musicians in torn and dirty clothing, a knife, several harpoon tips, a lady’s fan, two large cameos composed of tiny shells, an obscure map of interlocking terrestrial and celestial circles, and a three-dimensional crucifixion scene that