Europe : Prague Nuns Lock in Profits With a Prison Guest House : Sisters subsidize convent by opening former secret police headquarters as hotel. President’s cell is most requested room.

Just mention Bartolomejska Street and it conjures up chilling images of police oppression. The narrow, Old Town roadway was home to the country’s most dreaded law enforcement agencies of the Communist era.

But today Bartolomejska is mostly quiet except for the incessant banging of construction crews at building No. 9, the former headquarters and interrogation center of the notorious StB secret police.

The building belongs to a small order of Franciscan nuns, who have discovered that a little ingenuity can go a long way in the ferociously capitalist Czech Republic. The Order of the Gray Sisters has decided to subsidize the upstairs convent by opening an unusual downstairs enterprise.

For $33 a night--rock bottom by fashionable Old Town standards--guests can spend the night in the cellar prison, the same underground detention center where thousands of “enemies of the state” endured grueling captivity during 40 years of Communist rule.

The most notable non-paying guest was Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who became president four years ago. The door to his former cell, No. 6, has been marked with a plaque, and the main stairwell to the cramped dungeon bears a photograph of a grinning Havel at the Czech National Gallery, his ear cupped listening to a holy man in a medieval painting.

“He was imprisoned here five or six times, mostly just before the revolution in 1989,” said Jiri Vidim, who operates Penzion Unitas for the convent. “I think most everyone in the post-revolution government had been here at one time or another.”

The bare-bones guest house first opened last year on the first and second floors of the four-story building, only weeks after the last police officers cleared out their desks. It was expanded hastily into the cellar several months ago, in part to make room for about 50 sisters who moved into the top floors and wanted the second floor left as a buffer zone.

Unitas has been closed this month so crews could tear out the bowels of the prison and first floor of the 130-year-old building, which had served as a monastery for more than 80 years before the nuns were evicted in 1948. The Communists also confiscated adjoining St. Bartolomejska Church, turning it into a shooting gallery for police recruits.

Both structures have been returned to the order, but the cost of restoring them is so great that the nuns turned to private enterprise. They hired Vidim, who has managed to keep the 42-room hotel at 93% occupancy--enough to pay for the building’s make-over.

Although Unitas will remain a no-frills operation when it reopens next week, walls are being replastered, floors re-carpeted and glaring fluorescent lights replaced. The prison cells and first-floor rooms have also been equipped with hot and cold water and electrical outlets.

Bars remain on most prison windows, and the steel cell doors have been left in place. But peepholes and food slots have been welded shut and the original locks removed. The prison cots are also gone, replaced with iron army beds.

There are no radios, televisions or telephones, and guests must use common toilets and showers. Vidim said the hotel is striving for a middle road between comfort and authenticity.

“People were complaining the place was too worn out,” he said. “We wanted to get rid of this image without changing things too much.”

The sisters forbid alcohol in guest rooms and demand silence each night during their 10 p.m. prayer service. They have also been reluctant to exploit Havel’s name, fearing that it may appear unseemly. The hotel does not charge extra for his cell, though it is the most requested room, and souvenir stickers proclaiming “President Vaclav Havel Was Jailed Here” are sold at cost.

The hotel has also turned down several proposals from people willing to pay large sums to be locked away for a week or more. Such requests strike Ales Rundus, imprisoned twice here in the 1970s, as bizarre. Last week, Rundus discovered eavesdropping wires buried in the plaster of Havel’s cell. “That’s the kind of place this was,” he said.