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September 7th, 2008

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Prague underground

A look inside the city's hidden spaces

July 16th, 2008 issue

By Zach Blaue

JAN PŘEROVSKÝ/THE PRAGUE POST

While the Metronome ticks fitfully (below), a network of abandoned passageways and chambers beneath it are slowly being eaten away by water and decay.

For the Post

The rusting steel doors set in granite at the top of Letná hill don’t attract a lot of attention. In fact, the average park visitor hardly notices them, his attention typically captured instead by the Metronome monument above, the sublime view of the city below or the sausages and Staropramen at the nearby beer garden.

But this morning, the doors are being opened. A guide from Acton, the property management company that maintains the site, draws back the bolts and the heavy metal panels swing out on reluctant hinges. Instantly, the black cavern within becomes more interesting than the sunlit spires of the city below. Flicking on flashlights, we leave the airy beauty of Prague behind and cross a grimy threshold down into the darkness.

Prague is a city full of forgotten places. They exist in cracks and gaps and under the ground, hidden behind the myriad attractions of the city’s surfaces. While tourists flock by the thousands to the churches and bridges and glittering shops, few suspect that some of the city’s most interesting pieces of history are to be found not in the colorful charm of its cobblestone streets, but in the dank and dark spaces that lie hidden beneath.

It was the lure of such secrets that first brought me to Prague. Supported by a Fulbright grant, I came to research the architecture of forgotten space in the Czech Republic. Hoping to discover relationships between the country’s infrastructure and its political and industrial history, I spent nine months seeking out parts of the city and country that are usually overlooked. Over the course of the project, the research took me to many unexpected places: World War II bunkers deep in the Šumava forest, coal mines in Silesia, Soviet military ghost towns, secret munitions caves in Moravia.

But most fascinating by far were the sites I found in Prague. These are abandoned pieces of history, buried beneath streets and hills or sometimes decaying in plain sight. Lying static, deserted and derelict, they offer silent testament to the city’s turbulent and often bizarre past.

Dark passages

The underground chambers of Letná are among the most remarkable of such spaces. Their story begins with the gigantic statue of Josef Stalin erected atop the hill in 1955. Beneath its base, workers carved out a series of cavernous halls, a total of 7,000 square meters (75,347 square feet) stretching beneath the 17,000 tons of stone above. The chambers reach from the front of the plinth where the Metronome now stands back to the grassy fields of Letná Plain. The main space is 5 meters high, a great echoing grotto forested with hundreds of battered and pockmarked concrete columns. Smaller halls branch off to the sides and rear, some now blocked up with brick and shards of rock.

As we explore the deeper reaches of the subterranean chambers, my guide, Vladimír Ptáčník, points out a massive mound of broken stones in a central hall. These, he explains, are the remains of Stalin: When the statue was demolished in 1962, much of the rubble was simply dropped down into the chambers below, where it has lain ever since.

Around the rest of the cavern, calcified stalactites of wastewater hang tentatively from the concrete ceilings. On the walls, grotesque graffiti characters flicker into sight under the flashlights’ beams, then fall away into darkness. The only sound is the muffled thunder of the Metronome’s ponderous machinery above, and the only illumination beyond our meager flashlight beams is from the open doorway, now a tiny square of white, far in the distance. The black vastness of the space is overwhelming.

Still, some have found the place appealing. In one of the chambers, a circle of discarded Braník bottles and cigarette butts litter a brick platform. In another, a pulpit and an arc of shattered benches wrapped in plastic suggest a strange subterranean courtroom. These finds and others confirm Ptáčník’s rueful admission that his company has not yet managed to locate and block all the tunnel exits.

Also intriguing is the fact that nobody I talked to could say for sure why the underground chambers were built in the first place. The most common explanation is that the space was meant only to house counterweights, balancing the dictator and his eight colossal stone comrades.

Architectural historian Zdeněk Lukeš offers a more interesting theory: “I think the first idea was to build a monumental crypt for [Czechoslovak President] Klement Gottwald — to keep him after his death in a glass coffin, as with Lenin and Stalin in Moscow.”

If that was the intent, it was never realized. After Khrushchev rose to power and ordered the statue destroyed, the primary use the communists found for the space was potato storage. For the most part, the caverns were simply locked up, and remained officially closed to the public until the Velvet Revolution.

Something fishy

Only after 1989 did the Letná underground enjoy a brief phase of popularity. The space was used as an illicit art gallery, a gritty performance venue and the broadcast headquarters for Prague’s first independent radio station, Radio One. While none of it had official approval, it enjoyed a certain celebrity, with members of the new government attending shows and exhibitions involving artist David Černý, among others.

But the pirated use of the space didn’t last long; safety and security concerns resulted in the steel doors being closed once again in 1990. Soon after, the General Czechoslovak Exhibition brought the Metronome to the vacant statue base.

For almost two decades, the space was largely ignored. The new century brought ideas for renovation, most notably a 2000 plan by Australia-based company Underwater World Oceanarium to build a huge aquarium. However, after several years of tortured negotiations between the company and City Hall, the proposal has stalled. A 2005 bid by crystal giant Swarovski to build an underground museum of Czech history also came to naught.

By the time we step back outdoors an hour later, squinting in the morning sunlight, Ptáčník has made it clear that the space is nowhere near ready for reuse. Electricity has long been cut off, water pipes and trenches shoot awkwardly across the floors, columns are crumbling and rebar and steel mesh protrude from the walls.

Though the complexity of a renovation is clear, it seems a pity that a site so closely bound to Prague’s recent history should lie neglected. But Lukeš perhaps sums up the city’s attitude toward Letná and other forgotten places of Prague the best: “Maybe sometimes it’s better to wait, even for a long time, than to make the wrong decision for an important place.”

Exactly how long the Letná underground will have to wait is anyone’s guess. For now, the doors are closed and the caverns quiet, and only the implacable stalactites move under the beat of the Metronome, grinding intermittently over the vast and darkened space below.

—Future installments of this series will explore other underground spaces in Prague.

Zach Blaue can be reached at features@praguepost.com

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