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September 7th, 2008
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Petitions support sausage

By Benjamin Thomas Cunningham
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
January 9th, 2008 issue

It’s after 11 p.m. on a Sunday night, and a guy named Max from Voronezh, Russia, is drinking shots of slivovice (plum brandy) with his buddy at a sausage stand on Wenceslas Square.

Nearby, four Czech guys are trying out phrases like, “What’s your name?” and “Where are you from?” in English, sounding for all the world like they’re practicing drunken pickup lines.
Now that some of the carnival-style sausage stands are slated for demolition, they seem more popular than ever with tourists and locals alike. City officials approved new street vendor rules Dec. 4, citing vagrancy and litter. Two stands have been closed down already, and another is slated to close in June, says Jiří Wolf, a spokesman for the City Hall.
But Milan Janeček, owner of DMJ, the company which runs several stands on the square, has gone on the offensive, gathering more than 10,000 signatures on petitions in less than a month to try to keep them all open.
Janeček said he will consult his lawyers to decide what to do with the signatures. Even though the petitions carry no legal weight, Janeček is hoping they’ll serve as a powerful symbol to sway city opinion.
On the counter near the cooking sausages at one stand, there’s a clipboard filled with three pages of signatures and addresses. Other clipboards at other stands have pages and pages of signatures.
Max (who says he doesn’t want to give his last name because he’s on vacation) loves the sausage stands in Prague and the free-wheeling capitalism they represent. Where else can you get an iconic Prague experience for such a reasonable price, he asks, rhetorically, his buddy belching on his shoulder.
Love them or hate them, lots of people have strong opinions about the stands. Since The Prague Post first reported that they’re slated to close in the Dec. 12 edition, we’ve been deluged by positive and negative mail on the subject.
We’ve heard lots of nostalgia, mostly from Czechs who have moved away, for the most typical snacks from the stands: the sausages, sauerkraut, dark bread and mustard.
But we have also received numerous complaints about how stand employees are rude and give wrong change to unsuspecting tourists (problems we have personally experienced as well).
Several people have sent us “tips” about how the stands are run by the Russian mafia, while just as many others say police should go easy on the little guys who are just trying to run their small businesses on the square.
“This reminds me of the great experience that is Prague, for good or ill,” says Robert Guenther, a visitor from Los Angeles. “I’d hate to see them gone when I come back next time.”
But Bryon Burt, of Houston, Texas, feels the bad outweighs the good from the stands, as the street vendors take the good vibes and hospitality out of what is otherwise a beautiful cultural and historical experience.
“I am sure the city has received more complaints about stealing from tourists than from improper food handling,” Burt says. “The cost of bad press loses the opposing prosperity in the long run.”
That’s the direction city officials are following with a remake of the square that limits the food stalls, re-routes car traffic and makes more space for the pedestrians jostling on the sidewalks.
And city officials aren’t just singling out sausage stands for attention, Wolf says — they’ll close down at least one newsstand on the square as well.

Benjamin Thomas Cunningham can be reached at bcunningham@praguepost.com


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