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By Root 106 0

can-can, but after one cycle of this they die down to a flaccid burble and remain there. Even at its most anemic, the fountain enthralls the Czechs. The benches encircling the fountain are full of oglers, their expressions those of children who have received a new puppy. A mother takes several pictures of her young son standing beside the fountain, but she is no tourist: she lives here. The Communists were not big on fountains; fountains were impractical, water-wasting symbols of bourgeois values. The fountain in Kinsky Square not only doubles the city’s fountain population, but it is the only one people don’t have to pay to see. And so, though intended as a rebuke to erný, Prague’s ministers seem instead to have embraced him because, aside from a pink tank, there are few things further removed from the Soviet mindset than a fountain’s decadent burble.

What Communist-era Prague lacked in fountains it made up for in statues. Statues are inevitably the first things to go in the face of regime change, but dramatic photos depicting toppled tyrants only tell half the story. Because every discarded statue leaves behind a pedestal. Pedestals can be small, unobtrusive things or, depending on the statue, they can be more complicated. When a statue is torn down, its pedestal does not necessarily follow: pedestal removal is more costly and labor-intensive. The low-lying pedestal that once held Prague’s Lenin statue, for example, rises smoothly out of an isosceles triangle of polished marble. Uprooting this modest plaza would have proven expensive and unsightly, so when Lenin was given the boot the pedestal and its plaza remained, an inconspicuous wedge of stone tucked to the side of a blighted, oversized traffic circle on the northeastern edge of town.

The top of Lenin’s pedestal bears a rectangular scar marking where his statue once presided, but this is the only rough patch on the marble plaza’s otherwise smooth expanse. This makes it a novelty in a city brimming with cobblestones, the bane of the small wheel. And thus, the empty pedestal is a commodity of rare value to an urban creature Westerners take for granted but that Prague has only known since 1989: the skateboarder. The post-Communist blossoming of skateboard culture has resulted in Lenin’s pedestal being tagged in thick black marker and claimed for a ramp, a modest, smooth-planed oasis in a city of unsuitable skating surfaces.

More conspicuous, and potentially more dismaying to the pedestal’s former tenant, is the bright yellow tent that occupies the far corner of the vacant marble plaza. There is no telling how long this tent has resided here, nor how long it will remain. Though the skateboarders seem unfazed by its presence, they keep their distance. The tent is populated by young men and women wearing bright yellow jackets printed with the words VOLUNTEER MINISTER. Anyone who ventures within hailing distance of the tent’s opening will be greeted by a cheerful young woman with an unremittingly intense gaze, who will employ every technique short of physical force to encourage entry. Those who step within will be brought before a giant photo of L. Ron Hubbard, at which point—if they listen very carefully—they just might hear the distant creak of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin turning in his tomb. In retrospect it is not so surprising that Scientology should fill a void left behind by Socialism: one prophet simply blazed the way for another. Between the plaza’s two current squatters, the proletarian skaters certainly would be more to Lenin’s liking; the hypothetical meeting between V. I. and L. Ron suggested by this tent on this plaza evokes images of epic cataclysm, as when matter and antimatter are brought into contact. Upon reflection, however, Hubbard’s tenancy here seems inevitable: nature abhors an ideological vacuum.

Further proof of this axiom can be found in Letná Park, a pretty stretch of green that occupies a cliff overlooking Old Town from the Vltava’s northern bank. At the edge of this cliff stands a giant, motionless metronome. It rests on a massive plinth that