The Underground City of Prauge

After a couple of days in Prague, we were persuaded yet again that the best idea is to take a tour. Without tours, cities are just confusing combinations of oddly named streets and beautiful, unidentifiable buildings.
While Collin was blogging, I wandered around the lobby of our hostel. I poked my head into the corner where the vending machines ask for 35 Czech Crowns for a soda (which is about $1.25, but it is shocking to see a number in the tens). I perked up my ears to listen to the differnt languages people were mumbling to each other in, and finally, I took a look at the wall of brocures, lazily thinking that nothing would spark my interest.
Luckily, I was wrong.
I found a flier that said "Prague Undergroud Tour." I looked a little closer to find out that there are in fact remnants of the first streets of Prague, or "Praha" as the Czech refer to it, two stories below what is now ground level.
The tour was 400 Czech Crowns, which is 20 dollars, but the flier advertised a 33% discount, and since we had been saving so much money staying in Prague, it sounded like the perfect tour. It included a tour of the underground, a city history (which we desparately needed), and a drink afterward.
We met in Old Town Square, which is one of the main tourist attractions. The streets of Old Town and the east side of the river were somewhat scummy and filled with closed-down shops from ten to fifteen years ago. But the Old Town Square had some gorgeous architecture including the Town Hall that proudly wears the famous and beautiful Astrological Clock (which we later learned was celebrated by burning the eyes out of its creator so that he couldn't make a similar clock for another city. Stories of barbaric Czech violence like these color the rest of the tour's tales blood red.)
When we started the tour, Collin handed the money to the man, who promptly prepared our change, and instead of placing it in my open-faced palm, he brushed past me to find Collin's. I was offended, but then I realized that we were in a different culture and that maybe Czech men would be outraged if a salesman gave the change to his girlfriend.
Much to my delight, this man was not the tour guide. Instead it was a girl who had a very lackluster sense of humor that was monotone, dry, and sarcastic and presented in a Czech accent--it was fabulous. I laughed out loud at her jokes, which sounded like they came out of a How to Give an Underground Tour of Prague tape, because I couldn't help but find her serious, dry voice to be exactly what I expected from a post-teen Czech tour guide!
For what I could understand of the tour, which was most things but a few things still fell through the cracks of her murmured second-language, Prague started at the castle. There is a folktale that says that there was once a princess who had a vision of the city that would one day become Prague, and as she pointed to the region where the city would someday stand, a man was in the forest chopping down a tree for a threshold for his door--hence the name Prague, which loosely means threshold, comes from the correlation between the princess and the guy in the woods. The more likely scenario is the second version we heard, which was that when people would cross the Vltava river, they would go through what would become Prague because it it is the most shallow point in the river, thus, a threshold.

(The photo is of a mosaic showing the princess pointing toward what would someday be Prague that is on the ceiling of the Town Hall building that leads to the undergournd remnants.)

Anyway, like I said, Prague started as at the Prague Castle. First, there was St. Vitus' church around which a castle and community were built. As the community outgrew the castle village, the king ordered that fortifications be built around the settlements that were forming beyond the castle walls.
As they built the fortifications, they dug up so much earth that they were presented with the dilemma of what to do with it. (Now the specific time scale of all of this gets a little hazy, but this is what I could make of what she said.) They then had two problems: a flooding river and excess earth.
They then decided that they should raise the ground level of Prague so as to prevent floods and to do it with the excess dirt they had. After that, what was once street-level became basements and cellars as a new city was built on top of the old.
It was amazing to stand between walls that were built in the 1200s and then covered as the new Prague went on above it.
There were these incredible wells all around the underground village, and the tour guide explained that the archaeologists were able to go in and sift through the refuse that was once tossed into a well that was no longer used for water to uncover specifics about how the people who lived in the original Prage went about their daily lives.
There were statues lining the walls that represented families that had killed each other

to climb the social totem pole. There were tales of people being thrown down holes in the ground as punishment and left there to die. There were names carved in stones in a room that served as 27 men's final living space before they were executed in the 1600s for exiling a reformer who came back to seek revenge. They were all thrown out the window the next day.
Garlic was hung to represent the culture's superstition in vampires, and animal bones in the walls because the people believed that it would fend off evil spirits. (Collin is standing next to what was once an oven that has animal bones in the area above the brick.) It was amazing! This was such a beautiful tour that showed us so much about the history of Prague and the people who have inhabited it for so long. Collin will tell you about the beautiful things we saw the next day, and aside from those things, this tour was the best part of our trip to Prague!