Month: March 2026

Jovan Jovanović Zmaj:

With all the hurly-burly of finishing The Book and my subsequent visit to an Alpine sanatorium, I forgot to mention that the wife and I had a chance to go to Obecní Dům (Prague’s Municipal House) for a friend’s upscale birthday celebration two weeks ago. Obecní Dům is one of the architectural landmarks of Czech’s brief one-of-the-ten-richest-countries-in-the-world phase between the wars: Art Noveau masterpiece, houses works by Alfons Mucha, blah blah blah…

Going to a private party in Obecní Dům is one of those things that simultaneously feels highly pretentious but also undeniably gratifying in that you can really sense that guys in top hats were legitimately doing the same thing 90 years ago, presumably arriving via hydrofoil and lighting cigars on fire with thousand crown notes and whatnot. Basically, it’s one of those things like Bourbon and Branch in SF where people are willing to pay a bunch of money to experience a convincingly retro atmosphere, except in this case the retro atmosphere actually has some real historical legitimacy and isn’t just a made-up bogus embarrassment.

Going to Obecní Dům for the first time was significant because we’ve actually had a piece of the building’s facade living with us in our apartment, although I didn’t know it for a long time. When we moved in, this giant cement baby head was mysteriously hanging from a beam:

 

Being generally afraid of babies, I tried to avoid direct eye contact with the thing and came downstairs every morning hoping it would be gone in the same mysterious fashion that it disappeared. Eventually resigned to its presence, I took advantage of the landlord showing up at one of our parties to ask him where it had come from in the first place. He – a retired architect – replied that he was working on a face-lift of Obecni Dum at some point in the 80s and somehow came into possession of a leftover cherub from the building’s exterior.

A note about our landlord: he – a semi-retired architect– and his wife are in their late 60s or early 70s and live right below us and seem to have stepped out of one of those Merchant Ivory films that soft-peddle genteel visions of Europe to American audiences. If I were ever casting a movie that required a cultured, likable elderly Czech couple, I would immediately call them.

I also thought to ask him about who had lived in our flat before us, since it’s a very idiosyncratic attic flat that one can only imagine a childless couple inhabiting. This led to the following exchange:

Landlord: ‘Oh, they were a very nice couple. Much like you, in fact: the woman was Czech and the man was an American. And they also liked traveling quite a bit.’

Me: [imagining exact duplicates of us; starting to get a bit creeped out].

Landlord: (after a pause) Except they were quite old. Older than us!

Me: [radically recalibrating mental image, as my landlord is about 70s years old]

So, there seems to be sort of a Benjamin Button dynamic happening with our place. No doubt caused by the magical concrete cherub.