Vltava River

Today we turn to Prague Unbound, the odd guidebook used by Lee Holloway on his journey to Prague, to learn a little about the famous river coursing through its center.

Coursing through the heart of Prague, the Vltava River (its name is derived from the old Germanic word for “wild water”) is the longest river in the Czech Republic, running some 267 miles before merging with the Elbe River. Classical composer Bedřich Smetana wrote his most famous tune in its honor — before later going deaf and being plagued by depression and madness — and the river features heavily in the city’s mythology. The wise woman Libuše prophesized Prague’s founding while standing at a cliff overlooking its waters and was said to cast off her discarded lovers into its depths, the Golem was by legend made from the mud of its banks, St. John of Nepomuk was drown in its currents (as was Paul Leppin’s poor fictional Hans who fell in love with a wax doll named Maria).

The river has long acted as home for the vodník – bearded, web-fingered water sprites who dress as vagabonds and spend leisure hours smoking pipes and playing cards when not collecting the souls of the drowned inside lidded porcelain cups (a bubble rising to surface of the river means a dead soul has escaped vodník containment).

The River has a habit of unleashing devastating floods upon the city, two of the worst occurring in 1890 and 2002 (as you, Kind Reader, know all too well). The Vltava has been described as “a repository of tears, source of the malady of melancholy”, a river that came “from faraway…time could do nothing to suppress its fury, its wild grief…”

Others claim the grandiose river is actually “only four millimeters deep, and filled with leeches.”

(Photo via Ivan Mlinaric. Flickr Creative Commons)