Prague, 2001

Golden Lane runs along the wall inside Prague Castle, with houses built against the wall in the 1500’s. Today those buildings are shops and displays. Nearby is St. Vitus’ Cathedral, the third iteration of a church on the site, named for a Christian saint from Italy because, purportedly, a relic of St. Vitus (his arm?) was gifted for the establishment of a Romanesque rotunda around 925 AD. Construction of the current basilica started in 1344 and only took 600 years to complete. We think public works projects take too much time today, which they often do, but we also often lack perspective.

St. Vitus was a vaguely familiar name to me because Mom would sometimes say someone was doing the “St. Vitus Dance,” which I don’t think she meant literally. Turns out, same guy as the church.

We visited Prague about a decade after the fall of the Iron Curtain. It was adapting to open society quickly, but pricing had not yet caught up to western standards, and service was warm and friendly. And pretty much everyone spoke English. One prominent memory is a dinner experience–cocktails, appetizers, meals and dessert, with wine–that could have been in a “Michelin-starred” bistro in Paris, except the bill was half what it would have been there.

Now if I could only find a way to show the scale of these little shops….

For more of Bill’s photographs, go to https://www.billdurrence.com/index