November is an hard month in the cold and foggy Berlin, therefore I decided to take a short break and go to Czech Republic for a weekend to visit my dear friend Chris. It has been a while since my last time in Prague and it has been even longer since my first visit as a broke wanderer in 2014 when I went for a small Euro trip including Slovakia and Austria.
The best memories from the first time were including Franz Kafka, the Prague Orloj and czech pilsner beer above all. Franz Kafka is one of the most inspiring, deep and expressive writers of the XX century. His short, modest and partly boring routinary life that made him look like an ordinary human being despite his extraordinary imaginative mind and his strong anxiety and insecurity which transpires from his writings are the peculiarities of a literally genius that had a strong influence on myself and my music, since some of my songs, one in particular ("You can find me in the Air"), are inspired by his tales. Back those days Prague was part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, therefore Kafka wrote mostly in german. Who knows if all the bureaucracy that was part of his habits and that was reflected in his writings might have been influenced by the language he used to write too. Most of Kafka literally production, about the ninety percent, was burned by himself because of his low self-consideration and lack of self-esteem.
The Prague Orloj is an astronomical clock in the old town of Prague. The clock was built in the XV century and somehow still has a very technological advanced designed (just to make it clear, America by that time was not discovered yet). The clock shows many different topic, also represented in most of the panteistic religions, like the sun and the moon and of course death, represented by a skeleton. There is also a sign of Christianism represented by the 12 wooden apostles. Despite an attempt of the Nazi to destroy it, this beautiful masterpiece is still standing there, more than 600 years after its first appearance.
Czech people are the biggest beer consumers pro capita in the world and this is something that definitely has an impact on the czech society too. Pilsner beer was first brewed in the Czech Republic and it takes its name from the city of Plzen. To make it simple a Pils is a pale lager beer aged with cool fermented yeasts in caves. The peculiarities of this type of beer are the light and bitter taste and the light colour.
Memento Mori is a latin sentence that can be translated into English as "remember you must die". The sentence mostly appeared on funerary arts from the Medieval period going forward. The concept was represented through a certain number of symbols, most commonly skulls, hourglasses and other kind of staff. It was mostly used in Roman times in order to deconstruct the culture of the triumphant general that after coming back from a war campaign believed himself to be a sort of a divinity. While in Prague I had the chance to visit the Sedlec ossuary, a site that is located roughly 80km out of the city, a church entirely made of human bones piled up in a sort of decorative way, one on top of the other, that make the whole building look magnificent in its own ephemeral majesty, bone after bone, making almost impossible not to transcend from the real and see things the way they are. The ossuary is supposed to contain bones from 40.000 to 70.000 people and somehow reminds me of that time in Paris, when I went to visit the catacombs, crossing the city walking past a countless number of human bones that keeps repeating themselves in a sort of redundant way. The church was built in 1870 by FrantiĊĦek Rint, a woodcarver that was employed from the church to arrange all the bones and it open to public everyday from 9am to 6pm.
