National Monument

Although not, strictly speaking, a legacy of the communist era – it was completed in the 1930s – the huge monument atop Žižkov Hill is, in the minds of most Praguers over a certain age, inextricably linked with the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, and in particular with Klement Gottwald, the country’s first ‘worker–president’. Designed in the 1920s as a memorial to the 15th-century Hussite commander Jan Žižka, and to the soldiers who had fought for Czechoslovak independence, it was still under construction in 1939 when the occupation of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany made the ‘Monument to National Liberation’, as it was called, seem like a sick joke. After 1948 the Communist Party appropriated the story of Jan Žižka and the Hussites to use for propaganda purposes, extolling them as shining examples of Czech peasant power. The communists completed the National Monument with the installation of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and Bohumil Kafka’s gargantuan bronze statue of Žižka. But they didn’t stop there. In 1953 the monument’s mausoleum –originally intended to hold the remains of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, Czechoslovakia’s founding father – received the embalmed body of the recently deceased Klement Gottwald, displayed to the public in a refrigerated glass chamber, just like his more illustrious comrade Lenin in Moscow’s Red Square. It soon became a compulsory outing for school groups and busloads of visiting tourists from around the Soviet Bloc. Gottwald’s morticians, however, were not as adept as the Russians – by 1962 the body had decayed so badly that it had to be cremated. Since 1989 the monument has been closed to the public except on a few special occasions (although you can wander freely around the exterior). This is a pity; although the massive memorial building has all the elegance of the reactor house at a nuclear power station, the interior is a spectacular extravaganza of polished marble and gilt, and its memorials – Soviet as well as Czech – allow a glimpse into a period of Czech history that many would prefer to forget.