Free Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City by John Banville

settled his court there. After 1140, when themoved back to Prague Castle on the left bank of the river, John Banvilleceased to be a centre of royal power until Charles IV turned his omnivorous attention to the area and rebuilt the castle and erected fortifications, the mighty remains of which are still to be seen. During the Hussite wars of the fifteenth century most of Charles's handiwork was destroyed. Subsequently,became a small independent town of traders and craftsmen, which in turn was flattened by the steamroller of history to make way for yet another fortress. The effects of these successive declines and falls are palpable still in the sombre, silvery air that seems so much thinner on those heights than down in the Old Town or even in melancholy Mala Strana.lures few tourists, a fact that adds immeasurably to its charm. It is best approached from the metro station, despite the looming Palace of Culture, a typical example of brutalist gigantism from the communist era, and the equally awful Corinthia Towers Hotel which, by a piece of glum serendipity, finds itself overlooking a prison - the exercise yard had to be roofed over to spare the hotel's guests the sight of the prisoners at break time plodding their doleful circles. Leaving these horrors behind, one enters Naanother of Prague's inexplicably deserted and faintly sinister streets. Here is the Tabor Gate, there the Church of SS Peter and Paul. The Rotunda of St Martin is a Romanesque jewel, still functioning as a church, one of the tiniest I have ever entered. The cemetery boasts the graves of, among many others, the composersand Smetana - the latter wrote an opera based on the legend ofand her lusty ploughman - and the writers Kareland JanNeruda. Walk on and you enter a lonely little park - the Czech word for garden, sad, seems, for the English-speaker, peculiarly appropriate here - incongruously peopled by four sets of enormous stone figures by Josef Myslbek, another occupant of the nearby cemetery, representing not only, and inevitably,and Pfemysl, but also Zaboj and Slavoj, the latter described by my Eyewitness Travel Guide as 'mythical figures invented by a forger of old legends'. The statues were moved here in 1945 from their original site, the Palacky Bridge, damaged by American bombs in February that year. That is another characteristic of bridges, unremarked in Heidegger's dithyramb: they tend, unhappily, to attract bombardment.
    What do I recall most clearly from my last visit toI draw up an inventory. Dead, damp leaves beside a gravel pathway. A mother and her toddler wandering through the cemetery in a vaguely questing way, as if these were not graves on either side but supermarket shelves. A nun in the Rotunda of St Martin, lighting a candle and smiling blissfully, angelically, to herself. Black spires seen through the bare black limbs of a winter tree. That soft-spoken man in a blue jersey sitting at a small square table selling entrance tickets to SS Peter and Paul's - of the church itself I retain practically nothing . . . Thinking historically, like giving a story a happy ending, is a matter of deciding where to stop. Hegel at Jena, writing on the Absolute, hears under his window Napoleon and his forces riding to battle and conceives of the little Corsican as the embodiment of the World Spirit. Napoleon, meanwhile, is pondering his haemorrhoids, those same haemorrhoids that may well have been one of the chief causes of his defeat at Waterloo. Everything ramifies. Facts are susceptible to an infinite process of dismantlement. Benoit Mandelbrot, the originator of fractal geometry, considered the question of how long, exactly, is a coastline? That is, at what level may we stop measuring the coast of Europe, say, and proclaim definitively that it is so many hundreds of thousands of miles long? If we employ a yardstick, the figure will be very much smaller than if we measure by the inch. Think of all those bays, those coves, those inlets; those dunes,