If you go through the open tunnel in the rock on the river bank you are wrong. You should have gotten off the tram at the previous stop. The advantages of the job of a tourist who has no idea or cannot recognize the identity between writing and speaking the complicated Czech language. I wanted to find out the origin of that magical and tragic city, the home of a terrifying witch who flies on her broom above the heads of those who cross the Charles Bridge, willing to enter the “small side” of the city and make it through those narrow streets that climb like veins. to the sky How did this city come to be, which for centuries was inhabited by the shadows of Golems and alchemists, Nazis and Communists, whose streets experienced both destruction and creation?

They say that the kings of Bohemia settled in Vyšehrad in the 10th century: Přemysl and his queen Libuše, the founder of Prague according to legend. On the banks of the Vltava (as Czechs call the river that others call Vltava in their own language), on a hill south of the old town of Prague, you can still visit the remains of this fortress. Paved paths surround a park with giant sculptures that represent founding myths, walls meander at the edge of a chasm where walkers and tourists pause before the scenery of the river and the old town just long enough to cage the sublime and bring it down to the screens of their phones.. Half buried among the stones, chestnuts are the remains of the past and the harbingers of the future: the remains of the spring that was and will return where today the chestnut trees, bare and sad, will be clothed in new-born green. Then the summer sun will come, which will make the masses of tourists sweat and drink the color from the leaves, and then the autumn, whose wind will uproot the chestnuts, which will end up in children’s pockets or forgotten and trampled among the earth, these ancient stones.. The passage of time is not just read. on the bronze plaques of the official history.

The origins of Prague and the history of the Czech Republic can be discovered in Vyšehrad.

(…) I let myself be carried away by that instinct that takes me away from power, crowds, lines to see the obvious.

A bored-looking Czech listens to Aerosmith while selling Chinese-made Russian souvenirs. In the restaurant at the fortress, salsa, merengue, bachata and reggaeton are played with all their might. A few steps away, in the small cemetery next to the basilica, Asian tourists visit the graves of Dvořák and Smetana. Readers pay tribute to Jan Neruda, whose poetry inspired a Chilean who took his last name. There are many luxurious last apartments of those whose names are written in the history book. But I let that instinct take me away from the power, the crowds, the lines to see the obvious. I explore the silence of unvisited graves. In the courtyard of history, I find a mother (Zdenuška Knoblochová, 1911-1948) and her baby (Zdeněček Knobloch, 1946-1946), I wonder what it would be like to live, in 37 years of life, two cruel wars and the loss of a son. In the adjacent grave, tangled and thorny bushes like barbed wire swallowed the name of the deceased. But on the gate of the cemetery it is written in large golden letters: Pax Vobis (peace be with you). (OR)