Memorials – The Prague Castle Obelisk Consider that the original idea for a simple memorial plaque to Czechs and Slovaks killed in World War One would end up with hundreds of tons of granite being mined, the military involved in transporting different versions and the final version installed in a different place than originally intended. … Read More
Memorial to the Victims of Collectivisation When you take individual private companies and bring them under State control that’s called Nationalisation. When you take an entire sector of production under State control that’s called Collectivisation. In post-1948 Czechoslovakia the theory for agriculture was that as the State now owned the company or the land it … Read More
WW2 Memorials – Josef Skalda There are thousands of memorials in the city and a large number relate to events and characters of World War Two. As I was passing this particular memorial I happened to notice that there was a lot of detail with a word that I had never seen before – SŤAT. … Read More
Memorial to Eleven Ice Hockey Players Surely one of the strangest memorials to the communist era is at Pšstrossova 24 in the New Town. It states that eleven ice hockey players were arrested in March 1950 and sent to prison. In fact several of these guys were either Olympic silver medallists in 1948 and/or ice … Read More
Last Address Memorials If you enjoyed reading the story behind the Prague Stumble Stones then you might also be inspired by another growing international memorial to look out for called the Last Address. Whereas the Stumble Stones are embedded in the ground outside the last freely chosen address of a person before being deported in … Read More
Prague Jewish Garden Not so fast, this is not some horticultural post about what grows in a Jewish garden. This relates to a cemetery close to Wenceslas Square that pre-dates the current Old Jewish Cemetery by 200 years and is recognised as the oldest Jewish burial ground in the country. In the mid-13th Century a … Read More
The Pig Farm Before you read this post you might like to get the necessary background by reading the Roma Internment in World War Two post. In 1992 an American journalist called Paul Polansky was in the regional Czech town of Trebon researching the 19th century emigration of Czechs to the USA and found that … Read More
Ivan Gončarenko Every now and again I start researching an apparently simple story which takes you in different unexpected directions. The story of a death of a soldier is not uncommon in Prague. It’s how he died, when and where, where he was buried then, where he’s buried now and how he came to be … Read More
