Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [18]
The jabberwock is the crown jewel of the cabinets. Measuring eighteen inches from the top of its crest to the tip of its tail, it is presumably a juvenile, the subject of the eponymous poem being considerably larger. Strahov’s version has the legs of a duck and three sets of aquatic winglike appendages that only vaguely resemble skate wings. Its tail is segmented, as thick as a man’s middle finger, and twice as long. Its scrawny neck is topped by the head of a malevolent Muppet, with a mouth that is not quite beak and not quite lizard’s maw, open in mid-squawk. The top of its head sports a thicker, larger version of a rooster’s comb, and from its right eye socket stares a baleful blue eye. The left one is missing: perhaps it was poked out by the bandersnatch before the two were separated. It’s hard not to feel hopeless love for this ugly, impossible, overlooked animal. It’s hard to refrain from building a jabberwock hutch for it in a quiet backyard somewhere, from feeding it chicken soup and consoling it with soft lullabies. In return it would certainly squawk and bite and shit all over everything. It would make an even worse pet than Strahov’s stuffed armadillo, but clearly it had the monks under its spell. For two centuries it has received their benevolent sanctuary.
The monks who amassed this collection are long dead and their replacements remain beyond the purview of the paying public. If the postmenopausal Czech ladies who monitor the hallways know anything about the creatures in the cases, they’re keeping it to themselves. And so, Strahov monastery presents an opportunity for an entirely different type of tourism, a mode of sightseeing easily transferable to the rest of Prague, where for every designated spectacle there are at least three that have gone unmarked and unsung. The anonymous inhabitants of Strahov’s glass cabinets pose as many questions about their exhibitors as they do about themselves, questions the stately tomes amassed in the neighboring rooms cannot answer. Perhaps the monks were duped by the wily, worldly peddlers of taxidermy who darkened their door: after all, citizens of earlier centuries had the luxury of believing in a wider range of creatures than we jaded inhabitants of the twenty-first. But, perhaps, mixed with the monks’ credulity was an equal amount of delight—perhaps they welcomed visitors to their cabinets with arched eyebrows and grandly outstretched arms. Perhaps late at night they gathered before the gold-scaled turtle, the egg-sucking lizard, the jabberwock, and the bandersnatch and giggled like mischievous children. In the absence of labels, anything is possible.
Political Theatro
OLD TOWN SQUARE LIES AT THE VERY HEART of the Stare Msto district. For eight centuries, the square served as a marketplace, rows of merchants’ stalls filling the cobbled plaza. Today the square is dominated by an Art Nouveau monument to Jan Hus, fifteenth-century Czech religious martyr and a celebrated symbol of Czech nationalism. The monument serves as a convenient meeting place for tourists and as a focal point for buskers and souvenir hawkers. Cafes and shops the pastel shades of after-dinner mints line the square’s periphery. Their Baroque roofs are interrupted at one end by the Gothic tower of a thirteenth-century bell house and at the other by an ornate fifteenth-century astronomical clock that every hour unleashes a mechanical morality play from two cuckoo-clock windows.
Over the centuries, Old Town Square’s size and location has made it an epicenter for celebrations, cataclysms, political enunciations, and executions. In the fourteenth century, King Wenceslas threw massive parties on the cobbles once the market had closed for the night; in 1600 the square was host to the world’s first public dissection of a corpse. The square was the headquarters of the Resistance during the 1944 Prague Uprising, in which five thousand