A Glass House

On my short walk back to my apartment after my weekly trip to the grocery store, there is a sidewalk that runs parallel to a large wall. The wall is too tall to see over, but not quite tall enough to raise one’s curiosity about what it might be concealing. About once a week, I pass along this wall carrying bread, milk, eggs, and any other essentials that will keep me fed until I return the following week. I’ve repeated this same commute for the last four months during my stay in Prague.

Halfway along the wall, I also pass a gate just large enough to allow the passing of a small car. What caught my attention one particular day was that the padlock and chain that are usually fastened around the gate were now hanging loosely on the handle. I pushed the gate open and found myself on a narrow road that perfectly divided a massive open space. Walking a few feet further, I found more open spaces, divided by more roads. Scattered inside these large square areas were granite gravestones, with occasional trees breaking up the uniformity.

Each grave was a different size, shape and age, as shown by the wear and coloration of the headstones. One stone commemorated Karel Havlícek Borovský, a Czech painter that died at the ripe age of 35. Just a few feet further, a worn, unmarked slab dated to the 18th century. The pattern continued a thousand times.

Had I not already lived in Prague for several months, I would have been more stunned, but the trend of finding hidden secrets like this was increasingly dulling my sense of surprise. I later found out that Olšany Cemetery was built in 1680 to house the bodies of victims of the plague that was sweeping through Europe. At one point, there were two million bodies buried under my feet.

Living in a country with a history that outdates my own by nearly a thousand years, I’d grown accustomed to the old. But that wasn’t what struck me the most – thousands of cities share Prague’s rich history. In the Czech psyche, it’s the dismissiveness that leaves the strongest impression. There is an apathy to the years of living under the thumb of Soviet Communism; an indifference to the oppression that led student-activist Jan Palach to set himself on fire at the top of Wenceslas Square in protest in 1969, and then have his ashes buried among thousands of others on the outskirts of the city. It was death, swept under the rug that I could feel within these walls.