What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on Twitter on 7 January 2023.

Máchova was built before 1884.

Ignác Mácha* was born on Újezd, on Malá Strana, in 1810. In 1830, he started to study at Charles-Ferdinand University, taking philosophy and law.

*He would later change Ignác to Hynek, and, taken with Czech patriotism, also added the doesn’t-get-much-more-Czech Karel.

During this time, he also learned Polish (inspired by the Polish Revolution in 1830), and starred in several plays. He started composing poems, first in German, then moving exclusively to Czech.

He also drew and painted, and wrote plays and prose.

In 1834, he started writing his masterpiece, Máj. Contemporary critics found it confusing and at odds with patriotic ideas, but it sold out and would be reappraised in the 1850s.

In 1833, Mácha had started a love affair with one Eleonora Šomková (pictured in 1886). She had a child by him in October 1836, and they were due to get married in November.

In the same month, after trying to extinguish a fire in Litoměříce, where he had moved to, Mácha became seriously ill, possibly from the water he used to do so. He died in early November of cholera, aged 25.

His funeral was held on 8 November, which had been supposed to be his wedding day. His son, Ludvík, would only live nine months.

There’s a famous statue of him on Petřín, and, as somebody whose head never fully got out of the 1990s, whenever I remember that fact, I think of this (not that the statue appears):