On Friday morning, June 23, 2023, we arose, had a final breakfast on the Monarch Queen, then said farewell to the ship which had been our home for a week and boarded our bus for Prague.
There had been a violent thunderstorm overnight and it continued to be overcast and rainy that day. The Bavarian countryside was wet and green and beautiful.
Arriving at the Czech border, the bus stopped at the inevitable gas-station plaza with its duty-free shop and American fast-food joints to refuel and give us a potty and snack break.
We were now in a country to which I’d never been before, the Czech Republic. Outwardly it was little different from Austria or Bavaria, except of course for the signs, which were all in Czech, a language I don’t know much about, except that it is Slavic like Russian, a language I do know something about. There are lots of similarities in grammar and lexicon. But whereas Russian is written in a Cyrillic script, Czech is written in a Latinate script with a lot of circumflexes, accent marks and so forth, which make it hard to guess the pronunciation from the spelling. Anyway, before long we arrived at our first stop, which was Pilsen, or Plzeň in Czech. Pilsen is the German and English spelling.
Pilsen is a city of 181,000 people, located 78 kilometers or 48 miles west of Prague. It is famous chiefly for being the home of Pilsner Urquell Brewery, which produces one of the world’s foremost beers. It is also the original home of the Škoda industrial organization, which was the leading arms manufacturer in Austria-Hungary prior to World War I. Years later, after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Škoda was forced to produce arms for the Wehrmacht, and their tanks were extensively used on the eastern front.
We had several hours to visit Pilsen and we also had lunch there. Our bus parked some distance from the center of the city and we had to do some walking to get there. Sandie had not been feeling well for days and wanted to stay with the bus, but in the end she was persuaded to come with the rest of the group. It was difficult for her but she was a real trooper and managed to make it through the excursion without incident.
Our local guide led us to the city’s central square, known as Náměstí Republiky or Republic Square. On the way we passed through several streets lined with venerable Baroque-style buildings, all of them well-kept and many beautifully decorated with elaborate designs and figures.
On Prague (Pražská) Street, among other attractions, we encountered the Vodárenská věž, or Water Tower, better known as the Black Tower because of its dark coloring. It is a five-story structure with a square base. Built around 1542, for years it was integrated with the city’s fortifications, until those were demolished in 1822. It continued serving as the city’s water tower until 1889, when its function was assumed by a new city water works, but then it was remodeled and used as offices for city officials. Nowadays it hosts a tattoo parlor, an art gallery, a coffeehouse and the Škoda family museum.
Heading west along Prague Street, we arrived at the northeastern corner of Republic Square. Our guide led us along the north side of the square, where we shortly found ourselves in front of the stunning Pilsen City Hall.
The Radnice města Plzně, as it is known in Czech, was built between 1554 and 1559 under the supervision of an Italian architect, Giovanni de Statia. It is thus basically an Italian Renaissance palace. But there is more. The decorations seen on the upper stories of the building, above street level, were not part of the original exterior. They were added in 1910, during a major renovation of the building, by a Czech professor and architect, Jan Koula. He used a technique called “sgraffito“, which in Italian means “scratched.” It involves putting down a base layer of some chosen material, then overlaying it with a second layer of different material, and finally engraving the top layer in such a way that the color of the lower layer emerges and forms a desired pattern or shape. In this case the patterns that emerge represent several important figures in Bohemian history, the coat of arms of the city of Pilsen, and allegorical figures associated with the town hall’s functions, such as Law and Justice. The effect produced is quite unique and striking.
Next to the Pilsen City Hall stands another noteworthy structure, which now houses the Turistické informační centrum města Plzně, or Pilsen Tourist Information Center. I have not been able to find out much information about it other than it was formerly known as the Imperial Building, indicating that it probably had some governmental function. But what is chiefly interesting about it is the statue of a knight carrying a halberd that stands on a pedestal projecting from the side of the building (is there a specific architectural term for this?). A bit of online research told me that this figure represents a “robber knight” named Žumbera, perhaps a sort of Robin Hood figure. (I couldn’t find any other names for him, or any dates associated with him.) In any case, his statue was one of three that originally stood on Republic square – in Žumbera’s case, the northeast corner, as part of a fountain. All of the three were removed, when and why is not certain, but Žumbera’s statue eventually ended up on the façade of the Tourist Center. I didn’t find out what happened to the others; however, as we shall shortly see, they were eventually replaced by modernistic sculptures. What little I was able to find out about Žumbera came from the website of a restaurant named after him, and I am very grateful to them for publishing that information. Next time I’m in Pilsen – I’d love to go there again – I’ll have dinner at the Restaurace Žumbera and thank them in person.
Dominating Republic Square is the Gothic Cathedral of St. Bartholomew. Although it is very old, having been begun around 1295, the same year as the foundation of Pilsen itself, it was not a cathedral until 1993, when Pope John Paul II created the diocese of Pilsen. Nevertheless it is no simple parish church; the spire, at 103 meters (338 feet), is the tallest church tower in the Czech Republic.
Aside from the cathedral, the most prominent structure on Republic Square is the Marian Plague Column, erected in 1681 as an expression of gratitude for the mitigation of an outbreak of plague the previous year. It is topped by a replica of the Pilsen Madonna, a 14th-century sculpture which is the most famous and valuable work of art inside the cathedral. The base of the column rests on a square platform consisting of six steps of stairs. The base itself is three-tiered; the lowest level is a balustrade consisting of pillars topped with stone balls. Also on this level are three statues, which are not part of the original monument but were added in 1714 to commemorate deliverance from a second outbreak of plague the year before: Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier, Franciscan St. Peter of Alcantara, and the patron saint of accidents and good death, the martyr St. Barbara. In addition, a niche on the second level contains a sculpture representing the plague patroness St. Rosalie of Palermo, sleeping in a rocky cave. The statues on the second level, by the sculptor Kristian Widman, are original to the column; they depict the patron saint of Pilsen, the apostle St. Bartholomew, facing the cathedral; the Czech patron saint Wenceslas (Vaclav in Czech, I hate those Latinized names), oriented towards the town hall; St. Sebastian, a protector against the pestilence; and St. Rocha, another protector against the pestilence.
The Marian Plague Column is on the northwest corner of Republic Square. Each of the other corners has a fountain. According to a largely unintelligible comment from a “local guide” on Google Maps, there were originally three fountains on Republic Square, but over time they were removed, when and why is unclear. (One of them, of course, would be the fountain with the Žumbera statue mentioned above, but the commentator apparently didn’t know that.) Eventually – again, it’s not clear when; perhaps during the 2005-2007 reconstruction – the idea was floated of having a competition to determine who could come up with the best idea for replacing the fountains. The winner was an architect named Ondřej Císler, who came up with three golden shapes based on heraldic figures appearing on the Pilsen coat of arms. I would not have been able to tell what the forms were supposed to represent if our guide had not told us. The “angel”, a shape somewhere between a “T” and a “Y”, is on the northeast corner, where we came in from Prague Street; the “camel” is on the southeast corner, and could easily be taken for many different four-footed mammals; the “greyhound” is on the southwest corner, and does vaguely resemble a sitting dog, though not necessarily a greyhound. To me the modernistic shapes seemed to clash with the 18th-century look of the square, and I would have preferred more traditional designs. But there they are.
All sides of Republic Square opposite the square itself are lined with attractive and historical Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque buildings, but aside from the Town Hall and a few others, it was hard to find any information about them. One of my favorites was the činžovní dům U zlatého kolečka, Apartment House at the Golden Ring, built in 1902 at the southeast corner of the square where Františkánská and Zbrojnicka streets meet, near the Golden Camel Fountain. The building has a tall bronze tower at its corner and is the location of a fashion accessories store named “Snowbitch.” It is not to be confused with the U zlaté koule, Golden Wheel, an apartment building dating from 1891, at the northeast corner of the square, where Prague and Roosevelt Street meet.
Soon it was time for lunch, and our local guide led us to an Italian restaurant, La Dolce Vita, on Prešovská Street, off the southwestern corner of Republic Square where the Golden Greyhound Fountain stands. As we strolled down Prešovská Street, we could see a towering structure at the end of the street resembling a Moorish castle. This was the Velká Synagoga, the Great Synagogue of Pilsen, second largest in Europe. We had already seen the largest, the Great Synagogue of Budapest, and the one in Pilsen closely resembled it, at least from a distance. The original design, done by a Viennese architect in 1888, envisioned two 65-meter (213 feet) towers, but the Pilsen City Council rejected it because they felt that its height was too close to that of the St. Bartholomew’s spire. A new design, with 45-meter (148 feet) towers, was proposed in 1890, and this time it was accepted. Completed in 1892, the synagogue served the Jewish community of Pilsen until the Second World War, when the Nazis carted all the Jews off to be exterminated. The synagogue was then turned into a storage facility and survived the war unharmed. But those Jews who came back after the war were too few, and the postwar Communist regime too unsympathetic, to maintain the synagogue properly, and in 1973 it was closed and fell into disrepair. But during the 1990s it was restored, and reopened in 1998. The Jewish community of Pilsen now numbers only about 70, compared to the 2,000 resident before World War II, so only one room is still reserved as a place of worship; the others are used for concerts, exhibitions and other non-religious functions.
The architectural style, formally known as Moorish-Renaissance Revival, is an amalgam of various elements including Russian-Orthodox style onion domes atop the towers, Arabic ceilings and an Indian-appearing Torah ark. Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to visit it or even view it from up close, as we had done in Budapest, but were only able to photograph it from afar.
After lunch, it was time to hike back to the bus to resume the journey to Prague. Traipsing back past Republic Square to Prague Street, I encountered a beautifully restored two-seater cabriolet roadster of pre-World-War II vintage, complete with a rumble seat. But try as I might, I could not find any name or emblem on it to identify the manufacturer or the model, nor was the owner around to ask, so I am still in the dark about that.
We trudged back to the bus by a route a bit different from the way we had come, passing the Black Tower on Prague Street and then turning left at the Black Angus Steak House onto a pleasant parkway with a little roundabout, where pretty little houses hid amongst the foliage nearby. After that it was only a block to the bus, though we had to dodge the traffic on busy Tyršova Boulevard to get to the parking lot. Soon we were on our way again to Prague.
