Old Holidays And New In Prague : Carp Dinners and Christmas Trees Give Way to One of Europe’s Most Raucous New Year’s

“Prague for the holidays?” a friend echoed, doubt heavy in her voice. “What’s next, summer vacation on Devil’s Island?”

A more than understandable response. For not only don’t we think of the potentially glum, invariably frigid environs of Eastern Europe as an ideal winter destination, ever since the term Prague spring entered the political lexicon the capital of Czechoslovakia seems unavoidably linked to palmier weather. Going in the off-season seems seriously pointless, like visiting Las Vegas on a week when all the casinos happen to be closed.

But spending the days between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day in Prague last year proved involving and satisfying in a variety of unexpected ways. If nothing else, the season’s pale winter light turns out to be especially flattering to the city’s dazzling array of beautiful, often centuries-old stone-and-masonry buildings.

And when the shortage of cars is added to the age and abundance of the historic structures that make up Prague’s core (some 1,700 are listed in a recent local survey as buildings of significance), the result is a quietly romantic beauty unlike that of showier places such as Paris or Vienna. Haunting, melancholy, elegant, Prague in deep winter has a faded Old World quality that is indelible.

But this city is hardly a Bohemian Williamsburg. It is the capital of a country delicately poised between the past and the future, serious about preserving its architectural heritage but also eager to embrace that future, to join the European community and get a shot at the big bucks that capitalism invariably dangles before new converts. And, surprisingly enough, it turns out that the most telling way to experience both Pragues, the courtly old city as well as the bustling new, is to spend both Christmas and New Year’s within its confines.

The city changes radically between Dec. 24 and Jan. 1. The days around Christmas are quiet; the city is just about tourist free, and the holiday celebrations are charmingly muted and local in character. Around New Year’s, however, everything turns upside down. For though Americans may not realize it, Prague has joined Berlin as the preeminent European place to be for New Year’s Eve, and almost overnight it fills to bursting with bus and trainloads of Germans, Italians and assorted other continentals, engulfing the metropolis in a way that only the height of summer comes close to matching.

This Jekyll and Hyde situation means that, unless you plan considerably in advance, finding accommodations in this notoriously under-hoteled city will be difficult. The best solution, and one that can be personally recommended, is to contact the city’s rental agencies (see Guidebook, page L14) and take an apartment for the duration. Our family of four ended up with a large, eccentrically decorated one-bedroom studio apartment just blocks from Old Town Square for a small fraction of what comparable (and not as well located or as colorful) hotel space would have cost. The elevator in the building did not work, and the apartment’s kitchen will not be in Architectural Digest any time soon, but the feeling of truly living in the city more than made up for that.

Ringed by buildings dating from the 15th Century and earlier, including the city’s famed astronomical clock, Old Town Square is one of the centers of Prague’s Christmas activities. When we arrived we found a large tree near the imposing Tyn Church strung with tiny colored lights, not enough to wow anyone in Beverly Hills but warm and welcoming in its simplicity, as were the creches almost all the city’s churches put on display. Booths on the periphery of the square were selling hot mulled wine for about 50 a cup, and a small stage featured a wide variety of live music, everything from Czech Christmas carols to a rousing--if unexpected--rendition of the country standard, “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad.”

Old Town Square is also the first place we made contact with the omnipotent carp, the fish that is at the heart of any Czech holiday celebration. For though no one seems to know how the two were first united, the carp has been essential to Prague Christmases for hundreds of years, as stone carvings in the square and the omnipresent smell of cooked fish in today’s apartment hallways attest.

Jammed into huge water-filled tubs at both ends of the square, hundreds of live carp wait patiently for their end. When a buyer selects one, the carp man quickly knocks it on the head with a small mallet, pops it into a handy plastic sack and hands it over to the customer. Sterner folks take the carp home alive and let it swim around in their bathtubs until just before dinner time. And, least one is tempted to waste anything, carp scales in your wallet are said to ensure financial good luck.

Special church services and seasonal musical concerts (the chapel at the Old Royal Palace is an especially active location) were also plentiful during our visit, and for those who are impervious to a chill that can go well below freezing, midnight mass at the city’s landmark but very drafty St. Vitus’ Cathedral, the pride of Prague’s castle complex, is an experience.

A much more low-key event than the one at Notre Dame in Paris, St. Vitus’ mass plays host to a friendly cross-section of citizenry, from devout old couples to hip dudes in cowboy boots and earrings to the inevitable roving packs of teen-agers looking to meet up with the opposite sex. Like everything else about Christmas in Prague, it makes the city feel like nothing so much as a big small town and shows how far the place has come from its former days as a showplace of godless Communism.

Though the day itself is a holiday when just about everything is closed, the crowdless time around Christmas is a good opportunity to visit Prague’s most popular tourist attractions, several of which, ironically enough, happen to be Jewish in nature.

The oddly named Old-New Synagogue is the most impressive of several Jewish houses of worship that have been turned into state-run museums. (Though many guidebooks don’t yet list it, the Maisel Synagogue on Maislova Street has just been reopened as a museum of ceremonial silver.) Dating from 1290 and said to be the second oldest synagogue in all of Europe, the Old-New has the feeling of a miniature Gothic cathedral and walking into it gives one the breathtaking sensation of entering directly into the 13th Century.

The feeling one gets entering the legendary Jewish Cemetery is close to being beyond words. For hundreds of years, the only location Prague’s Jews could be legally buried, it is a disorienting blizzard of teetering, tottering, disintegrating tombstones almost without number, and not one pointing straight up and down. A lost city of the dead, it stands timeless in Prague’s winter light, a forest of souls unlike any other.

The most visited tomb in the cemetery belongs to the wonder-working medieval Rabbi Judah Loew, the creator of the legendary golem, a mythical pre-Mary Shelley clay giant who later storytellers claimed protected the Jewish community from harm. The golem has paradoxically become one of the most visible tourist symbols of Prague; there is even a comic book extolling his exploits. Even more astonishingly, the city’s biggest culture hero turns out to be that shy and private creator of parables, Franz Kafka, whose house next to Old Town Square has been turned into a small museum. What this most non-public of writers would say about all the postcards, posters, T-shirts and even videos his face adorns is impossible to even speculate.

As Christmas ended and New Year’s approached, the ways in which Prague has leaped into the consumerist world became more and more noticeable. While some trams still tool around in unadorned black and red, most are now mobile ads for British Airways and Camels. A hoard of signs near the airport all read “Pepsi: The Choice of a New Generation” and not only did posters for things such as Johnny Walker Red appear in the most unlikely places, we saw brand new billboards going up almost everywhere we turned.

But while Czechs were understandably pleased about the proliferation of previously unavailable goods--a store named “Fruit de France,” just off Wenceslas Square, was Prague’s latest sensation--there was grumbling about increased skinhead violence, prostitution and cabs that don’t pay attention to the meter. Consumerism, obviously, does not always wear the pretty face of a French fashion model, and capitalism is a genie that hates to go back into the bottle.

The frenzy reached a fever pitch as New Year’s Eve approached. Polyglot crowds exuberantly crammed the city’s narrow streets and flowed back and forth across the gorgeous pedestrians-only Charles Bridge, which separates the Wenceslas and Old Town Square areas from the charming precinct of Mala Strana and the towering, impressive Prague Castle, part of which is now used as the Czechoslovakian president’s residence.

Except for ducking into the city’s already justifiably crowded beer halls (see story on L16) and packing the Jewish Cemetary, the crowds tend to stay almost exclusively on the streets, leaving Prague’s shimmering baroque churches and somber museums nearly empty and almost pleading for visitors. Especially not to be missed is Mala Strana’s Church of St. Nicholas, the city’s pride and joy. I walked in slightly out of breath and found myself gasping even more at the sight of flowing, undulating floor-to-ceiling columns that seemed to pulsate with playful energy. The church’s look is so dizzying and disorienting that I had to literally sit down and marvel at the power of a centuries-old visual effect.

Between holidays, we paid visits to Prague’s museums, which are nowhere near as gaudy, but several of them held considerable interest. The National Technical Museum (Kostelni 42), for instance, is built around a huge central room jammed chockablock with dozens of antique planes, trains and automobiles and also features what has to be one of the world’s largest collections of still and movie cameras.

If that collection is located in a sadly unadorned modern structure, the Museum of Decorative Arts (17 listopadu 2) is situated in a gorgeous turn-of-the-century palace built specifically to hold it. The second floor boasts an enviable collection of things that delight the eye, from furniture and glasswear to astronomical instruments and the most delicate and fanciful of Meissen porcelain.

Whatever else New Year’s Eve in Prague is, it is definitely not delicate. Though the habit of a large celebration apparently began as a local event after the extraordinarily popular Vaclav Havel was named the Czechoslovakia’s president on Dec. 29, 1989 (he resigned recently as the country moved toward dividing into independent Czech and Slovak republics by Jan. 1), residents of Prague are now more likely to stay at home eating such traditional New Year’s dishes as bread with raw garlic and slabs of uncooked bacon than venture out close to midnight. It is easy to see why.

As that hour approached at both Old Town Square and nearby Wenceslas Square, the heart of modern Prague, it seemed that every lout in Christendom was looped. Anarchy reigned supreme. Wildly boisterous drunks alternated between breaking beer and wine bottles on the sidewalk and throwing ear-splitting firecrackers at the unwary. Roman candles and red and green flares lit up the sky, a haze of smoke floated over everything, and the staccato bursts of explosive noise were unsettling enough to give even a conscientious objector a bad case of Vietnam flashback.

When we awoke the next morning and went out for a bracing walk, Prague felt like a city with a serious hangover. The Charles Bridge, impassible the night before, was now just about empty except for thousands of pieces of broken glass. Seeing this glorious monument to Prague’s past glory covered with the chaos of a Brave New World makes pessimistic long-range thoughts inevitable. How much debris will Prague’s linkage with the rest of Europe cause for this almost pristine city, and who will be responsible for cleaning it all up?

It was not very long, however, before one or two street cleaners, armed only with old-fashioned brooms, began to slowly and methodically sweep up the glass and place it in bins. Though the task seemed easily large enough to last the sweepers a lifetime, by the end of New Year’s Day most of the glass appeared almost magically gone, and that achievement left me hopeful about the city’s future. Maybe, in its own way and with its own style, Prague will find a method of dealing with its new status, keeping the warm spirit of its Christmas without losing the bristling, Pan-European energy of New Year’s Eve. That would be something truly worth celebrating.

GUIDEBOOK

Practical Prague

Getting there: CSA, the Czechoslovakian state airline, has nonstop flights to Prague from New York City, but visitors from the West Coast who don’t want to change planes domestically can fly nonstop to London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt or even Scandinavia, and take the roughly two-hour flight into Prague on any number of airlines. Delta has a direct flight from Los Angeles, via Frankfurt, for $750 round trip.

Where to stay: Prague is seriously short of tourist space, and the rehabilitation of old hotels is a local growth industry. One of the city’s most charming is the Pariz (U Obecniho domu 1; 011-42-2-236-0820, fax 011-42-2-236-5948), near the far edge of Old Town Square, while the nearby Meteor (Hybernska 6; 011-42-2-235-8517, fax 011-42-2-22-47-15) was recently redone. Also long on charm is the tiny (and usually booked) U Tri Pstrosu, or Three Ostriches Inn (Drazickeho nam 12; 011-42-2-53- 61-51) just off the Charles Bridge. The Europa (Vaclavske nam 25; 011-42-2-236-5274), on frenetic Wenceslas Square, is a perennial bohemian favorite, with the most elegant little dining room in the city, while just around the corner is the Palace (Panska 12; 011-42-2-235-9394, fax 011-42-2-235- 9373), the fanciest, most expensive place in town and more than a little off-putting for all of that. Since rooms are so scarce, as well as being the only commodity in the city priced on a par with Western Europe, renting an apartment is a much-preferred alternative. We used an excellent agency, the English-speaking and very responsive Toptour (Rybna 3). Though Toptour can be telephoned (011-42-2-229-6526), a fax that lists your wants is the best way to contact the agency: 011-42-2-232-0860.

Where to eat: Restaurants are also in short supply in Prague, but two of the most interesting spots, both in the Old Town Square area, are Reykjavik (Karlova 20; no reservations accepted), a pleasant fish restaurant, and U Zlateho Jelena, or the Golden Stag (Celetna 11; local telephone 26-85-95), set in an old banquet hall several levels below ground. Near Wenceslas Square, the Palace Hotel features a bright, cafeteria-style restaurant that is one of the few places that bans smoking. If you are walking around hungry in the Mala Strana, Bio-Mart, on Mosteca, just past the Charles Bridge, has some of the best bread in the city.

Guidebooks: Though it is hampered by the author’s overreliance on a suspect sense of humor, the “Cadogan Guide to Prague” by Sadakat Kadri (Globe Pequot Press, Box Q, Chester, Conn. 06412; $14.95) is hands-down the most thorough and knowledgeable book about the city. If a jaunt through the rest of the country is planned, “The Real Guide to Czechoslovakia” by Rob Humphreys (Prentice Hall Press; $13.95) is the best of the lot.

For more information: Contact Cedok, Tourist Information, 10 East 40th St., Suite 1902, New York 10016, (212) 689-9720.