Letná Plain
From Prague Unbound , a look at the troubled history of Letná Plain…
Located on the northeast side of Hradčany, Letná Plain was long a strategic gathering place for the various invading armies preparing to lay siege to the Castle. Today, it’s home to a large open space park, its most visible feature a large metronome on a plinth overlooking the Vltava River.
The plinth where the metronome now stands was once the site of the largest sculpture in the world, a 90-foot-high depiction of Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, Liberator of Nations, Gardener of Human Happiness, better known as Josef Stalin. The short-lived monument had a tortured history – Otakar Švec, sculptor responsible for its creation, committed suicide three weeks before the statue was unveiled (his wife and assistant had killed herself two years earlier). Evidently still maintaining some sense of irony through it all, he left monies earned from the commission to a school for blind children as a way to make up for inflicting such an eyesore upon the people of Prague. The model Švec had used for his Stalin lookalike, an electrician at Barrandov Studios, killed himself as well, albeit by slowly drinking himself to death after being socially ostracized, his former friends refusing to call him by name and instead mockingly addressing him as “Stalin.”
Also in the statue behind Stalin stood the usual proletariat heroes – the honest laborer, the proud matron, the humble farmer, the brave soldier – and Praguers jokingly called to the hated monument as “bread line,” in reference the queues they regularly had to suffer to get their hands on ordinary foodstuffs.
To make matters worse, less than a year after the monument’s unveiling, Josef Stalin was denounced by Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev and his brutal crimes (at least some of them) brought to light. Krushchev said he wished to end the cult of personality that had been built up around Stalin over the last 30 years.
A cult, ahem, celebrated in massive stone fashion in Prague. Czechoslovakian authorities were further embarrassed because they couldn’t figure out how to dismantle to the 17,000 ton ode to despotism and genocide, and the monument remained in place for over five years before they called in West German demolition experts, who brought it down with the help of 1,750 pounds of dynamite over the course of two weeks* – the whole episode playing out like some bizarre 20th century incarnation of the Golem legend. It’s said remnants of Stalin’s exploded head may still be found in the stygian depths of the Vltava River.
Soon after the fall of Communism, in 1996 Michael Jackson (a kind self-created Golem, no?) had a huge statue of himself temporarily erected on the site to kick off his HIStory tour. Read into that what you will.
That Letná Park is also home to the oldest functioning carousel in Europe seems appropriate – for Letná is certainly a place where what goes around, comes around.
*Curiously, the Stalin monument was not the first large scale Otakar Švec work to be destroyed for political reasons – monuments he created to honor Czech heroes Tomáš Masaryk and Jan Hus were destroyed by the Nazis, and a monument to FDR was taken down by the Soviets. Clearly the poor man had a talent for aligning himself on the wrong side of history.
Photos via Aktorn, Wikimedia Commons, and Julo, Wikimedia Commons
