Day 7- Still Seeing Prague

Prague Castle sits high atop a hill on the other side of the Charles. This was not a castle as one might expect a castle to look. This castle was a walled collection of buildings that just happened to be sitting high up on a hill that is very tiring to climb, all the while dominating the surrounding landscape. This was obviously a castle designed for use by a stable emperor or king, not a constantly warring local prince.

The castle was very large and very old. The church in the middle of the castle was built sometime in the 1300’s. The church, by the way, was something of a highlight. It was relatively small for a church of that period (smaller than a city block) but still had the usual Gothic design including [appropriate trumpeted fanfare] flying buttresses.

Flying buttresses were a major breakthrough in architecture that allowed Gothic churches to have their characteristically light appearance. People told me that for years, however the person telling me about that always neglected to point out a couple things.

1.) What on God’s green earth is a flying buttress?

2.) How can a church built of stone blackened by years of pollution and covering an area about the size of Vermont appear to be light?

First we must address question 1. A flying buttress serves the same purpose as any buttress, that being it supports and/or strengthens whatever is being buttressed. Now, how does it fly, per se? Well, there is a gap between it and the wall. While that is not really flying, it is at least in its own space and everyone has to take their little victories where they can get them. Besides, the hyperbole didn’t hurt anyone. For an excellent depiction of a flying buttress, I recommend looking going to the entry for "flying buttress" in the Glossary for Medieval Art and Architecture.

What exactly, did these things do, some of you may ask? Aside from become one of those words that everyone who knows what it means assumes everyone else knows, kind of like "pince-nez"?

Previously, the only way to hold up a roof was with the walls or columns. The problem with that is that it took some very thick walls and a forest of columns to hold up a big and/or high ceiling, thus there were a lot of obstructed view seats, significantly lowering ticket prices.

Much of the Gothic church design is a result of the invention of the flying buttress in that it allowed the weight of the ceiling to be distributed outside the walls. The ribs of the vaults and arches in were built such that they upheld the ceiling, then these ribs were continued through the walls to the buttressing towers. To give an simplified example of how this works, imagine two playing cards leaning against each other such that they hold each other up. Now you can put whatever the heck you want to underneath the cards -- other cards, stacks of toothpicks, hamsters -- and it will have no responsibility for holding the cards upright.

Since the walls were now mostly responsible only for holding themselves up, they could put things in something as novel as, say, windows. Big ones with tons of stained glass, "Shape some of ‘em like roses," the bishops said and the architects and glaziers and artists and artisans said, "Okay!" because now they could charge the church even more for the detail work.

Thus, the idea of the church appearing light is from roofs soaring heavenward with steeples rising higher than the imagination. Sunlight cascaded in like waterfalls of brightness and color. A, long central corridor (the nave, incidentally) stretched forth as high as the clouds with unbroken vision, as though God himself had ordained the air to hold the structure aloft.

Impressive? Most definitely, especially compared to the inside of Romanesque churches, which would, by comparison, make it seem like you were spending your Sabbath inside an ill-lit brick.

Anyway, we didn’t get to go inside the church. Pity to waste all that rhetoric on something we only saw from the outside, but I am not a man to spare words that could be well spent making my tales longer. Incidentally, another feature of the church was the presence of the usual assortment of gargoyles, designed to be so hideous and ugly that evil spirits and demons would be scared off and thus not enter the church. I, in fact, have indisputable proof they are effective in this task; I mentioned their purpose to Rob and he told me he was looking at them and they made him nervous.

There were several other buildings in Prague Castle including a large, pink building with a lot of windows and a facade that never seemed to end. It looked generally functional, though still quaint and interesting, much like many of the other buildings in the castle. Presumably, even my old junior high school will also appear quaint and interesting when it is a few centuries old.

We grabbed a snack at the restaurant in the castle, as we were hungry but we still had home-cooked food to look forward to back at the Boathouse. It was a real shame we were not eating a full meal there, as I have few opportunities to eat leg of venison for the equivalent of six American dollars. That includes tip, because, as I may have mentioned, you don’t.

On the way out, we visited a small gallery containing someone’s photography exhibit of somewhere or another in South America; I believe the trek was through the Andes. Outside, a statue of a preadolescent boy stood in front of the nearby toy museum which, in itself, was not that remarkable aside from the fact this kid was completely naked, leaving my American sensibilities about "kiddie-porn" pretty shaken. I’m not sure when naked children become art but I’d highly recommend against anybody asking too many questions about this or asking them too loudly.

It slowly grew dark and the air turned cold. Troy led us to see a section of the wall that used to surround the city, but we were unable to do anything aside from look at it and agree there used to be a wall surrounding what was then the entire city. There was no way to climb it or anything like that, so we could not really do anything else besides admiring it as it rose up a hillside. It was neither fancy nor enormous, but simply very out of place in an American’s mind and thus was interesting.

We headed back to the hostel. My portion of the trip was winding down, it was time to eat and then it would be time for me to go.