Prague Pictures: Portraits of a City (10 page)

Legend, as the
Blue Guide
knows, has a deplorably lurid imagination, and in the matter of Prague's origins will have none of that boring stuff about Migrations of the Peoples and dy- nast's first seats. No no, listen, it says excitedly in its rough demotic, this is how it was: once upon a time in the east there were these three brothers, Czech, Lech and Rus. Seeking new homelands, they set out westward at the head of their respective tribes. Rus halted at the Dnieper and became Father Russia, while the other two continued on, Lech veering northwards to found Poland, and Czech climbing Rip hill in Bohemia and deciding that he liked all that he saw. Czech's tribe settled down happily here, and after a couple of hundred years produced a new leader rejoicing in the name of Krok
¹²
who lived at legendary
Krok had three beautiful daughters, Kazi the healer, Teta the priestess, and Lady
the prophetess. Presently Libuse inherited her father's throne and became ruler of the Czech Lands. However, since Czech's male descendants, like most men, then as now, did not relish the idea of living in a matriarchy - or, as my Internet history Runyonesquely puts it, 'a guy who did not like one of
decisions as judge started a stink about the fact that the Czechs were ruled by a woman' -
followed the dictates of a vision and sent a company of her subjects, accompanied by her white horse, into the forest in search of an
a ploughman, building a
a threshold of a house, and there to found a
a 'new town'. People and horse carried
Orac - Orac the Ploughmanin triumph back to
Castle on its stony eminence above the Vltava, where he and
were married, thus founding the Pfemy-slid dynasty . . .

How curious it is, the way in which one's fancy lingers on the least of history's props, and how, lingered on, the props spring suddenly to life. Beyond all this welter of names and dates and places, my attention keeps wandering back to that wooden bridge over the Vltava that linked the New Town on the right bank to the old Slav quarter on the left. What did it look like, how was it built? No sooner have the questions formed than the mind begins to drive the piles into the mud and link the arches one by one. Romantically, legendarily, I see it in storm, straining against the surge of waters, or hovering on the mist of mornings, or glimmering in the darkness of the vast medieval night . . . In the eleventh century the wooden structure was replaced by a stone one, 'the so-called Judith's Bridge' of the
Blue Guide -
but why 'so-called'? - and in time that too was replaced, when the great architect Peter
summoned to Prague in the city's Golden Age by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV, in 1357 built the bridge named after the Emperor that stands to this day, despite fire and flood and the generations of war.

At least, I think it was Peter Parlef who built it . . .

In the essay
Building Dwelling Thinking,
the philosopher Martin Heidegger meditates movingly on the essential nature of the bridge, the bridge's
bridgeness,
as
der Meister aus Deutschland
himself might put it. The bridge defines, brings into existence. 'It does not just connect banks that are already there. The banks emerge as banks only as the bridge crosses the stream . . . It brings stream and bank and land into each other's neighbourhood. The bridge
gathers
the earth as landscape around the stream.' The bridge is a 'location,' he writes, 'it allows a space into which earth and heaven, divinities and mortals are admitted.' Heidegger designates the bridge as a 'thing', in the ancient sense of gathering or assembly. 'The bridge is a thing and
only that.
Only? As this thing it gathers the fourfold.'