Travel: Prague

In case the proliferation of wine bars and smart hotels didn’t give you a hint, the Czech Republic’s biggest city is having a heyday

Written by Alice Feiring

Ask the average guy on the street what Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic, is all about and most likely his answer will involve beer and supermodels. There is no doubt that runway stars Eva Herzigova, Hana Soukupova, Petra Nemcova, and Paulina Porizkova all hail from this former Soviet Bloc entity. And yes, the pilsner is fresh, cheap, and plentiful. But woven into Prague’s legendary skyscape of Baroque spires and angular red-tile roofs is an unbelievably rich and culturally provocative history. Franz Kafka changed the course of literature here. Alphonse Mucha put a particularly Czech spin on the Art Nouveau movement. Here was born a bizarrely fascinating Cubist architecture and design movement. And anyone who knows anything about glass understands that the region of Bohemia, of which Prague is the centerpiece, is the historic home of some of the world’s finest crystal.

The largest city in a country that is still coming to life after its 41 years of communism fell away in 1989, Prague is Eastern Europe’s major hub, and a highly inspiring one at that. Along the banks of the lazy, winding Vltava river that divides this metropolis of nearly 1.2 million people—it is the longest waterway in the Czech Republic and was immortalized in song by the composer Bed?rich Smetana—Soviet-era buildings raise their Brutalist bulks alongside their more elegant Rondo-Cubist, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and medieval brethren. Honey-infused tortes have become a distinguishing feature in bakeries, thanks to a pair of enterprising Russian immigrants who launched the trend a decade ago. As for that hallmark Eastern European spice, paprika, it is treated with a kind of reverence here, with stout shopkeepers in cat’s-eye glasses doling out subtly different varieties of this powdered red pepper as if a 20-koruna purchase—about one dollar—were 2,000.

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