Time's Magpie - Myla Goldberg [5]
Aboveground, Communist architecture dots Prague in crazy-quilt fashion, interposing austere stone or brick façades and numbingly functional expanses of concrete in the dizzying amalgam of architectural styles that define Prague’s cityscape. Communist-era apartment buildings nestle next to Art Nouveau hotels. Atop the entrance to a municipal building, a blocky sculpture of a worker stares eye to eye with a creamy-skinned Art Deco sylph across the way. The Communist philosophy of architecture viewed building ornament as an opportunity for oversized agitprop; and so the exteriors of Prague’s Communist-era constructions are host to kerchiefed peasant women displaying leviathan feet too mighty for shoes and wrench-wielding mechanics caught mid-pull in heroic battles with hex nuts bigger than human heads. Divorced from propaganda and regime there is something sweet about a rectangular relief depicting a man inflating a tire, or laying bricks, or cutting stone, or carrying a food-laden tray to a table. These architectural artifacts retain a seed of Communism’s idealism, which after all is a philosophy that contains within its ruptured, rotting heart a beautiful if chimerical concept. There is something lovely about being surprised at a street corner by a terra-cotta relief of a man cutting cloth: we don’t often think of tailors, but they are important. Prague abounds in these commemorations, tributes to the smaller functional aspects of everyday life, facets too often invisible and overlooked.
Like its work ethic, the public signage of Communism has also outlasted its politics, but this evidence—inscribed across shop windows and printed on awnings and street signs—requires knowledge of Czech or access to a Czech–English dictionary to uncover. Prague’s store fronts are the most ubiquitous vestiges of this former era. In the United States these surfaces would proclaim their individuality: there would be Joe’s Hardware or Sally’s Beauty Salon, Lopez Groceries or Good Rise Bakery. In Prague, where commerce was state-controlled for decades, stores still declare themselves in a blunt, standardized manner antithetical to Western standards of commercialism. In Prague, all small corner groceries go by the sole name potraviny, which means groceries. Bread is bought at the pekaství (bakery), produce at the store whose sign reads ovoce zelenina (fruits vegetables), and meat at the store proclaiming maso (meat) above its door. Clothes are purchased at Levna Móda, a reasonably exotic-sounding name to an English-speaker, but meaning only “Cheap Fashion.” International businesses have made large inroads into the city’s center, bringing with them the kind of store name the West takes for granted, but in the outlying neighborhoods, the old store names remain. With a little more time and capital (changing a sign requires more than a changed ethos: it also requires cash) GROCERIES Martina will certainly become MARTINA’S GROCERIES, but for now a day spent running errands in the city still feels uncannily like entering a George Orwell story or a dystopic sixties-era BBC television series.
Many of Prague’s streets also continue to bear the stamp of an obsolete system. Renaming public thoroughfares was an ongoing Soviet preoccupation from the time the Red Army entered the city in 1945. Streets were rededicated to war generals and Communist cultural and political icons; bridges and squares were renamed for Soviet military triumphs and army battalions. A particularly nice stretch of road along the Vltava River was rechristened Gottwaldovo nábeží for Klement Gottwald, Czechoslovakia’s first “Working Class President” and a loyal Stalin toady. In the wake of Communism’s collapse,