What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 3 December 2023.

I think the best way to start this one is to take a look at two of the plaques on the ground.

Between 1948 and 1989, 205,486 people were convicted. 248 were executed, and a further 4,500 died in prison.

327 people died trying to cross Czechoslovakia’s borders; 170,938 citizens emigrated.

A monument, erected in May 2002, commemorates these people, but also those who aren’t counted above and whose lives were ruined by the regime in this time.

It was created by Olbram Zoubek (1926-2017), who was especially known for having taken a death mask of Jan Palach: https://www.pametnaroda.cz/cs/magazin/videa/sochar-olbram-zoubek-o-posmrtne-masce-jana-palacha.

Zoubek worked in partnership with architects Jan Kerel (1944-2022) and Zdeněk Hölzel (born 1947).

The memorial consists of a staircase with six figures (all male, which I do have feelings about). Going up the staircase, the figures become more mutilated. But they’re still standing despite all the terrible things happening to them.

There was some awkwardness around the unveiling – the then-mayor of Prague 1, representing ODS, didn’t invite then-President Václav Havel until two days before. He declined the invitation and visited the monument the day before instead.

One of the figures had an explosive placed it in November 2003; we still don’t know by whom.

@BBCRobC spoke about this at the time: https://english.radio.cz/prague-monument-communist-victims-damaged-explosion-8080124

The path at the foot of the moment was given its own name, Alej obětí totality, and a street sign, in 2018.

Interestingly, Petr Janda and Aleš Kubalík, whose proposal wasn’t chosen to be exhibited in Prague (it came third), were able to see their (slightly revised) vision made reality in 2006, when Liberec got its own Memorial to the Victims of Communism.

At its foot is the mirror-inverted caption: Sám v sobě hledej, zda svobodu bráníš, ctíš nebo omezuješ’ / ‘Look within yourself to see if you defend, honour or limit freedom’: https://liberec-reichenberg.net/stavby/karta/nazev/13-pamatnik-obetem-komunismu

OK, I don’t feel able to end this thread here.

I don’t use this platform to get into debates, and, frankly, one of my main takeaways from xformerlyknownastwitter since I started using it regularly is that I can quite easily end up with an aversion to people whose side I’m actually on (or whose side I thought I was on).

But, whenever I see statistics about preventable deaths, anywhere, I can’t help but thinking that, for most of those people, there’s usually any number of others whose lives are turned upside down by such an event.

Loved ones, friends, co-workers, people who were financially dependent on the deceased, heck, even pets. And then there are people who didn’t know the deceased well, or at all, but liked what they had seen or heard.

And then there are people whose death is barely noticed. That’s even f**king sadder.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, except that life is short and I should spend more of it checking in with people and less of it working.

And that the only thing about writing these posts that isn’t absolute freaking joy is the gender imbalance of it all.