The Czech Radio building on Prague's Vinohradska Street
Czech Radio, or Cesky Rozhlas, has been at its current location at 12 Vinohradska Street (known in those days as Foch Street) since 1933, ten years after the station was launched. In those days it was known as Radiojournal, which is now the name of it's flagship station here in the Czech Republic. Oldrich Cip is a world renowned expert on short-wave radio and has been working here at Czech Radio for around 40 years. When we toured the station he told me a little bit about the building's history.
"The actual work on the construction of this building we are standing in was started in 1929 and it was finished in 1933."
And the building's official name is Radio Palace?
"Yes, that was the original perhaps...but there is another place up Vinohradska Street with a similar name."
That's where Czech Radio was before it moved here?
"Yes, exactly. But there were other places because, obviously, the growing Radiojournal company needed a lot of space and so they were dislocated in various buildings then. But then serious broadcasting activities started after the building here was put into regular service and that was, interestingly enough, on the tenth anniversary, in May 1933."
As we toured the station Oldrich Cip took me down a staircase and corridor where I'd never been to show me a plaque commemorating Czech Radio's contribution to the Prague Uprising in 1945, just days before the end of the war.
"This was the first continuity suite of the Czech revolutionary broadcasting in May, 1945. So we are standing directly...although this is now a staircase and a corridor because of the extensive rebuilding...but this is the place where the original call for help was transmitted. They called the Czech police, Czech firemen and people in Prague to help them in the building to defend the radio. And this really was the signal to the uprising of the Czech people then, in 1945."
Were many radio people killed at that time?
"Yes, when we walk through the main entrance of the radio building there is a list on brass plates of people who were killed during this event."
The story of the Prague Uprising is quite well known, but what many people may not know is that at that time our headquarters here on Vinohradksa Street came under missile attack.
"Because the centre of the uprising was in Radiojournal and in the building the Nazis organised an air attack against it and actually the building was hit by an air torpedo, and quite seriously damaged."
Do you know what floor did it hit or where did it hit the building?
"I think it hit the centre, not the front to Vinohradska but the back part of the building. But it was reconstructed in keeping with the original functionalistic design and it is probably not very much felt now."
Czech Radio now has two back to back buildings, the old one where our offices are and the new one - opened in the year 2000 - where all the new studios are. Before we crossed the concrete bridge to the new building on Rimska Street, Mr Cip was keen to point out some of the original furniture in the old building.
"Some of these fittings that we see around here in the corridors of the now disused studios, the heavy wooden furniture - made of oak with brass fittings - these are original fittings dating from 1933, as well as the paternoster lift, which is a sort of a Central European specialty, perhaps.
Ah yes, the wonderfully named paternoster, which - if you've never seen one - is a kind of non-stop open wooden lift that you step into and out of as it's moving - a bit tricky the first time you use it but you soon get used to it. Just before the "magic door" to the new building Oldrich Cip's attention was drawn to the doors of the old studios.
"These are the doors that I mentioned. These are really the doors that were installed and put into service for the studios in the 1930s."
The handles look like on a submarine or something like that?
"Yes, a pressure chamber of some sorts (laughs)."
In front of us now there is a very strange looking machine which is a big piece of metal with a kind of slit in the middle. What is this, Oldrich?
"It's quite a substantial looking thing, very heavy, and it is an electromagnet that uses alternate current to erase the old-fashioned tapes, the big tapes that were employed for recording the programmes for decades in the past."
This machine is just sitting here - I presume it's not used any more?
"Maybe only for the archive, because there are still many sound recordings kept on these tapes, so I think from time to time at least it is still employed, but of course it belongs to the history of Czech Radio."
The new building, with its grey unfinished concrete walls and low ceilings, is ultra modern and home to several state of the art studios. Interestingly, on the lower floors you can see huge black springs which counter the vibrations caused by the trains which run directly under the building. Once there Mr Cip and I tried to visit the main control centre on the 6th floor but at first had some trouble getting in, due to the relatively high security.
"This is the centre of the whole building. When there was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia (in 1968) this was also the first...they tried to organise a coup d'etat against the Dubcek leadership and of course this started also in the main control room of Czechoslovak Radio. And it failed, and the Czechoslovak Free Radio operated for several days in spite of the coup d'etat."
So that's why security is so high now?
" (laughs) Maybe. It's really a very important place."
Eventually however we did make it into the main control room and quite a place it was too, housing banks of computers and all kinds of complicated looking equipment. Even though Oldrich Cip was - like me - there for the first time he had no difficulty describing it.
"This is the main control room of the Czech Radio, through which also Radio Prague programmes are switched over to our transmitters, partly in the Czech Republic at the Litomysl transmitter site and also to the World Radio Network satellite service provider in London and from them say to Radio Miami International, and to our listeners of course."
