What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 2 June 2022.

K Chmelnici was built in 1962.

A chmelnice is a ‘hop garden’ (as in ‘beer’, not ‘skip and jump’, because Czech Republic). Chmel is the common hop, or humulus lupulus.

Hop gardens are quite expensive to maintain, as hops are a climbing plant, so they need to be equipped with wooden poles so that they can grow. And the poles need to be replaced about once every twenty years.

They’re most frequently found in north-west Bohemia; most were built in the 1930s.

The Czech Republic has the fourth-highest number of hop gardens in the world, though the number is in decline.

And there was presumably once one here.

A ‘hop-picker’ is a česač chmele.