More exciting than visiting somewhere new, is visiting it in the footsteps of someone whose work you admire.
Just before leaving for Prague, on a most happy whim, I packed Paddy Fermor's A Time of Gifts. If you haven't heard of Fermor, he is a writer-adventurer who plays the English language like a grand piano. Witty, erudite and always beautiful, this book recounts his teenage trek across Europe from Rotterdam to Istanbul in 1933. I had read a sizeable chunk before arriving in Prague, but there is a difference between reading of far-off wonders, however magnificently described, and standing before the sights in question, with sumptuous commentary cascading in your ears. He was the best-spoken guide I could have asked for.
Here is Fermor in the chapter Prague under Snow, admittedly in one of his more technical moods (I learnt more architectural jargon from him than from any formal guide):
'From the massed upward thrust of its buttresses to the stickle-back ridge of its high-pitched roof it was spiked with a forest of perpendiculars. Up the corner of the transepts, stairs in fretted polygonal cylinders spiralled and counter-spiralled, and flying buttresses enmeshed the whole fabric in a radiating web of slants. Borne up in its flight by a row of cusped and trefoiled half-arches, each of them carried a steep procession of pinnacles and every moulding was a ledge for snow....'
'There was another heirloom of the old Bohemian kings hard by the cathedral: the church of St George, whose baroque carapace masked a Romanesque church of great purity [....]'
'[....] The round arches that we call Norman plunged through bare and massive walls, flat beams bore up the ceiling; and a slim, gilt medieval St. George gleamed in the apse as he cantered his charger over the dragon's lanced and coiling throes. He reminded me of that debonair stone banneret at Ybbs.'
'Among crowding churches and a mist of trees, two armoured barbicans prick their steeples like gauntlets grasping either end of a blade and between them flies one of the great mediaeval bridges of Europe. [....] High overheard and every few yards along either balustrade stand saints or group of saints [....]
Nothing that I have ever seen quite compares to this bridge. I had seen paintings before, but never did I expect to find something still more enchanted, still more laden with years of vibrant cultural intermingling....
'At the middle of one side and higher than the rest, stands St. Johannes Nepomuk. He was martyred a few yards away in 1393- he is said to have refused, under torture, to betray a confessional secret of Queen Sophia. When the henchmen of Wenceslas IV carried him here and hurled him into the Vltava, his drowned body, which was later retrieved and entombed in the Cathedral, floated downstream under a ring of stars.'
'Our wanderings had ended under a clock tower in the old Ghetto, where the hands moved anti-clockwise and indicated the time in Hebrew alphabetic numbers. The russet-coloured synogague, with its steep and curiously dentated gables, was one of the oldest in Europe [...]'
Thank you, Paddy Fermor.
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