DiscoverEU Entries #4: Prague

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The church,

It's ghosts,

and the writer.

By day, a vibrant, unmissable travel destination best recognised for its labyrinthine streets, assortment of national desserts, Astronomical Clock, gothic architecture, and a bridge whose original history is idly buried by the presence of a certain 1980s English darkwave band. But nevertheless what goes on by day turns by night, as once the dark creeps in, and the town lights its lanterns, the cozy and bustling daylight atmosphere gets dulled down, and a melancholic silence befalls the town, quiet that feels frightening in the absence of the sense of calm.

The bare, dark orange flame does very little for illumination, like a candlelight, which only shows the path in front by the step.The sunlit windowsills and luminous shopdisplays by day draw a thick, deep-murky curtain which leaks an ominous, anxious feel though the bottom of the hem, leaving a sense of mystery for what now resides behind the curtain. The tilted house corners - disappearing and unimportant in the daytime crowd - now stand eerily at night, draped in shadows too small to hide an elephant, but not small enough to hide just a cat. 

And then there is the chapel. Scariest of them all, it stands in the midst of the webbing alleyways - a giant in the dark, standing alone and overlooking the city. Its unlit, dark Gothic exterior - the grandness with which it overpowers the rest of the town - makes it seem as though it is not a part of the city, but belongs somewhere else entirely. Or is something else.

Its vague silhouette hints it might just be a ghost, or have them in the windows, wandering, or looking down to midnight walkers, like you. Every inch of the chapel feels like this, and every street surrounding it. The whole city is a ghost town.

And the writer sits, and writes on it. He is being haunted by them, some from the church, some from his past, and he can’t seem to get away. He writes, “ *** never lets you go… this dear little mother has sharp claws,” and they never did. He was the only one who saw them. He saw past the claustrophobic streets, the dim silhouetted castles, and the shopping window displays, he saw into them. And he wrote. He wrote the melancholy that lingers at night in the town, too. And all because he did not wait for the morning, for the dawn to come, for the shadows to disperse, and for the creatures to follow them.

He did not believe the light would ever come back, he believed he would not live to see it do so, but it did, and it came behind the Vitkov Hill.