Passing Through Prague

I did a little more than pass through Prague. I was there for five days and I loved the city, the capital of the Czech Republic. I'm not the only one who loves it because there were thousands of tourists there at the end of August. The Old Town is well preserved and the New Town had wonderful Art Nouveau architecture. Then there was the brutal gray architecture from the Communist period.

A few things surprised me. Everyone seemed to speak English, most of them very well. I only ran into one lady who sold drinks and snacks at a little kiosk in an office building that didn't speak English but we managed to communicate anyway. People were also helpful. One day I wanted to take the tram up to the castle. I found the street but I wasn't sure which side of the street I was suppose to be on to go up the hill. I asked two ladies. It turned out that both of them were Czech but one of them now lived in Australia. They took me under their wing and made sure I got on and off of the tram at the right places.

I had expected the food to be more to the sauerkraut and dumplings side but that wasn't the case at all. I ate at several cafes near my hotel and the food was varied and really delicious. One night I had a pizza and it was a really, really good pizza. I don't know if it was because I was so hungry or it was really that good but it was a great dinner.

I found that the places I wanted to see were all within walking distance...that is if you are into walking several miles in a day. The St. Vitus Cathedral and Castle was huge and I wish that I had purchased the audio guide. After I left there I found the Lobkowicz Palace and with the admission you also get the audio guide. That was one of the highlights of my trip to Prague.

One thing I wish I would have done is add a few more days to my stay in the Czech Republic and have gone out in the countryside. There are a number of medieval towns that I would have liked to have seen. Certainly, I would have planned to overnight a night or two at Cesky Krumlov.

If you want to see a few of the pictures from Prague click here.

A Part of My Life

While in Prague I wanted to go to Terezin which was an old fortress town about an hour outside of Prague built in the 1780's. About 7,000 people lived in the town when during World War II the Nazis moved them out and began using it as a concentration camp for Jews. This was the Nazi "model" Jewish town that they used for propaganda for the Red Cross and the world. In actuality, tens of thousands of people died there, some killed outright and others dying from malnutrition and disease. More than 150,000 other people (including tens of thousands of children) were held there for months or years, before being sent by rail transports to their deaths at Treblinka and Auschwitz extermination camps in occupied Poland, as well as to smaller camps elsewhere.

You may be wondering why I'd want to go there. I was a young child during World War II but at the end of the war the news reel pictures at the movies and in Life Magazine of the Prisoners of War and the Jewish Concentration camp survivors was printed in my brain. I also remember something about the trials of the Nazi war criminals. Oh not the details but it is a part of my history. So I wanted to see a Nazi Concentration Camp.

Terezin is a day trip from Prague and in the end I decided to hire a guide to take me through the Jewish Quarter in Prague. My wonderful guide was a Jewish woman whose parents had survived so my half-day tour was more like a first hand account of  the Nazi Holocaust and life under Communism.

The Jewish Quarter in Prague is really very small. The picture above is one of the walkways into the Jewish Quarter. There are several Synagogues, one of them is the oldest in Eastern Europe built in 1270. Those synagogues within the Jewish Quarter are museums and memorials to the Jews who lost their lives in the Holocaust. This picture is just a tiny piece of the walls in one of them where their names are recorded. It is set up by family name and then the members of the family. Sometimes it was name after name in one family. Being surrounded by these walls of names was emotional for me.

Another thing that hit home with me is that women were only allowed into a back space or upper gallery which was usually mostly concealed. Another reminder about the status of women throughout most of history.

This beautiful Moorish-style synagogue was built in the 1800's and has been loving restored since World War II.

My guide told me that most people in the Czech Republic are not connected to any religion, or as she put it, few say prayers. There were some 120,000 Jews in the area in 1939. Just 10,000 survived the holocaust. Today only 1,700 people "register" as Jews in Prague. There are probably more but after their experiences in the Holocaust and Communism they do not proclaim their religion.

I was surprised at how this trip turned out to be such a reminder about World War II. It is time to pull out a few history books about the period and put some events and places in perspective. I'll be writing some other entries about how places reconnected me to this part of my lifetime.

Pre-Visualization

I have to admit that although I took a lot of pictures, most of the time I was just shooting but not necessarily seeing the scene as a finished image. But when I was in the Cemetery of the Old Jewish Quarter in Prague I saw it in a dark monochrome. I saw it in square format. I wanted it to feel as dense and compressed as it was.

 

This cemetery was established in the first half of the 15th century. Jewish law forbid Jews from destroying a Jewish grave and in particular they were not allowed to remove a tombstone. Also, they were forbidden to bury Jews outside of the Jewish Quarter so purchasing extra land was impossible. When they ran out of space more layers of soil were placed on the existing graves, the tombstone was sometimes lifted and more people were buried. This resulted in the cemetery having 12 layers of graves and tombstones packed densely. Although this is not a very big space, it has been estimated that there are approximately 12,000 tombstones presently visible, and there may be as many as 100,000 burials in all.

 

Seeing the image as I wanted it to be in a print was pre-visualization. I was totally aware of this as I framed images although my camera shows me a rectangular color image in the viewfinder and I was totally aware of how I would process this file in Lightroom. Ansel Adams, the father of pre-visualization, would have been proud of me. Maybe his spirit was sitting on my shoulder for a little while that day.

Where Are The Pictures?

Tourism is alive and flourishing in Prague. Even on a rainy day the Old Market Square is full of tourist and for every 1,000 tourist there has to be 500 of them who has a camera and is aiming it at something. All kinds of cameras, iPhones, Point and Shoots, mirrorless cameras with and without interchangeable lenses, small DSLRS and a surprising number of  top-end DSLRs with BIG zoom lenses. These two young women had just taken a picture of the horses and I was taking a picture of them. They looked up and saw me and asked me to take a picture of them with their iPhone. I did.

It was impossible to make a photograph of the landmarks of anyplace that I traveled that had not been made many, many times before. And it was impossible to take any pictures without a herd of tourist. Oh, that didn't stop me from making pictures because I came home with hundreds and hundreds of image files.

Now everyone is telling me they want to see my pictures. They don't really want to see all my pictures unless maybe they are trying to fall asleep and counting sheep hasn't worked.  I'm going through the files editing and processing the RAW files. Eventually I'll post a link to the edited files. In the meantime, I'll post a few on the blog along with a story or two.