What's in a Prague street name

Originally published on X on 16 January 2024.

A jáma is a pit, a hole, or a hollow; a synonym for this is a prohlubeň. And, expectedly, pits/hollows are what the terrain round here once consisted of.

The hollows round here had water in them, and, in the early days of the New Town, were used by the various traders who worked round here (and who we’ve spoken about a fair bit lately) as a rubbish dump.

It seems that the area was once quite interesting geographically (and wet) – see https://whatsinapraguestreetname.com/2024/09/01/prague-2-day-169-na-rybnicku/.

For those who enjoy literary titles in foreign languages, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 short story, The Pit and the Pendulum, is Jáma a kyvadlo in Czech.

And, for vocab fans, a jáma lvová is a ‘lion’s den’.